Solo Man


Solo Man is a subspecies of Homo erectus, identified based on fossil evidence of 18 specimens discovered between 1931 and 1933 by Gustav Heinrich Ralph von Koenigswald from sites along the Solo River, on the Indonesian island of Java, dated to between 116,000 and 108,000 years old. The remains are also commonly referred to as Ngandong, after the village near where they were first recovered, and older remains located at Bapang.
It is a late variant of H. erectus, dated to after 120,000 years ago, overlapping with Homo heidelbergensis and possibly with early Homo sapiens. Though its morphology was, for the most part, typical of Homo erectus, its cranial capacity of 1,013–1,251 cm³ places it amongst the larger-brained representatives of its species, and its culture was also unusually advanced.
Due to the tools found with the fossils and many of their more gracile anatomical features, Solo Man was first classified as a subspecies of Homo sapiens and long thought to be the ancestor of modern Australo-Melanesians. More rigorous studies in the 1990s have concluded that this is not the case. Analysis of 18 crania from Sangiran, Trinil, Sambungmacan, and Ngandong show chronological development from the Bapang-AG to Ngandong periods.