Rare Fossil Find In Manhattan
When Henry Galiano first poked through the box of fossils he bought for his shop last March, he thought the large, rounded bone encrusted with dirt and age was an elephant's femur, or maybe a mastodon's.
Only later did he realize it was a human skull - and possibly important in the evolution of man.
"This, if anything, has missing-link qualities, something in common with us," Galiano, 48, said Tuesday in recalling the discovery that has triggered a flurry of excitement among scientists.
His Maxilla and Mandible Ltd. sells everything from animal skeletons, trilobite and fish fossils in rocks to huge mounted beetles and butterflies.
The consensus among paleoanthropologists who have examined the skull is that it is from Indonesia, is anywhere from 100,000 to one million years old and offers clues to a possible connection between Homo erectus, the ancient race that spread from Africa into Asia up to two million years ago, and Homo sapiens, or modern man.
What sets it apart is the shape of the skull - a high forehead and a brain cavity suggestive of speech or advanced mental capabilities, not previously seen in a human skull from that period and location.
It came to the scientists' attention after Dr. Eric Delson, walking past the shop, a block from his office at the American Museum of Natural History, was invited in by Galiano to "look at something really cool."
"I thought, 'Wow! This is Homo erectus, that doesn't belong here in New York City.' It was not like any I'd ever seen," said Delson, who also teaches at City University of New York's Lehman College.
While the seller had told Galiano the box of fossils came from an estate, investigation and photos soon confirmed that the skull, with its heavy brow and missing upper and lower jaws, was the same one previously mentioned in an obscure paper by a scientist in Indonesia.
It was believed to have been found by a local farmer several years ago and sold to a buyer at the village of Poloyo, in central Java, a region famous for hominid fossils, including Java Man, the original Homo erectus bones found by a Dutch doctor in 1891.
Delson now leads a team of experts studying the artifact, with findings expected by year's end.
"We still don't know how to interpret it," he said, but choices include "an individual unique in time," a previously unknown Indonesia Homo erectus that looked and acted more modern than others, or a Homo erectus "going somewhere in the direction of modern humans."
Delson said the latter theory, while perhaps most intriguing, was also least likely. Most anthropologists believe Homo sapiens evolved directly from ancestors in Africa and Asian branches of Homo erectus are evolutionary dead ends.
The skull probably belonged to a male in his 20s, scientists said. Of special interest is the cranial cavity, which shows one side of the brain larger than the other, hiting at speech or advanced cognitive ability.
"The individual was probably right-handed, which has a strong association with speech. You couldn't rule out language for this beast," said Dr. Ralph Holloway, a Columbia University paleoanthropologist involved in the study.
Galiano, who worked 12 years as a curatorial assistant at the nearby museum before opening the shop, was showing a polyurethane-cast replica of the skull to visitors on Tuesday.
The original was returned to Indonesia last week with Dr. Teuku Jacob, a paleoanthropologist at Gadjah Mada University in Jogjakarta, who came to New York to examine the skull and is now a member of the study team.
The identity of the seller of the box of bones remains a mystery, and he has not returned to the shop as he promised he would. Galiano wonders whether he might turn up, having realized too late that he sold for small change - the shop owner won't say how much - an artifact possibly worth up to $500,000, according to some experts.