Petralona skull

Poulianos (1981) estimated the age of the skull at around 700,000 years. He announced that "the date was based on analyses of the cave's stratigraphy and the accumulated sediments". Poulianos concluded that the skull represented a previously unknown hominin genus, unrelated to Homo erectus, and even outside of Homo, introducing the genus name Archanthropus, and the trinomial Archanthropus europaeus petraloniensis for the Petralona skull itself. Independent paleoanthropologists have tended to classify the skull as either Homo erectus, Homo heidelbergensis or Homo neanderthalensis. Poulianos dates the fossil stratigraphically, claiming an age of the relevant layer of about 670,000 years old, also based on electron spin resonance measurements. Other researchers point out that contextual animal fossils "found with it are known elsewhere from approximately 350,000 years ago". In 1987, researchers announced that the cranium cannot be older than 620,000 years, based on palaeomagnetic and mineral magnetic studies of the cave's sediments. A 2025 study based on U-series dates of the calcite that encrusted the skull yielded an age of 286,000 years old. As the calcite grew over the skull after it was emplaced, this represents a minimum age bound of the skull. This study estimated the age of the skull at around 300,000 years. == Layer 10 ==

In 1992 an international team published its results of a uranium-series dating analysis of the small cavern, called "The Mausoleum", where the skull was allegedly found and the sediments, named "Layer 10" by Poulianos. The results confirm earlier findings "that the whole of layer 10 represents a long time span, from about 160 ka to more than 350 ka". The minimum age refers to the brown calcite layer, which covered and cemented the hominid skull to the wall. The fossil encrustation is insufficient to date it by alpha-spectrometric, uranium-series methods, yet its minimum age was concluded to be also 160,000 years. Neanderthal (Homo sapiens neanderthalensis) and as an early generic class of Homo sapiens. A. Poulianos, on the other hand, believes that the Petralona cranium is derived from an independent class of hominids unrelated to Homo erectus. Runnels and van Andel summarise the situation as follows: "The only known hominid fossil in Greece that may be relevant is the Petralona hominid, found by chance in 1960 in a deep cavern in the Chalkidiki. Controversy surrounds the interpretation of this cranium, and it has been variously classified as Homo erectus, as a classic Neanderthal (Homo neanderthalensis), and as an early representative of Homo sapiens in a generalized sense. The consensus among today's paleoanthropologists [is centered around the idea] that the cranium belongs to an archaic hominid distinguished from Homo erectus and both the classic Neanderthals and anatomically modern humans. Whatever the final classification may be, the cranium has been provisionally dated to ca. 200–400 thousand years old and it is thus possible that the Petralona hominid is a representative of the lineage responsible for the Thessalian Lower Paleolithic sites." The fossils have been preserved at the Geology School of the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki since 1960. == References ==