Additional human fossils from the Middle Stone Age of Die Kelders Cave 1, South Africa: 1995 excavation

Die Kelders Cave 1 (DK1) preserves Middle Stone Age (MSA) horizons, the uppermost of which date to between 60 and 80 kyr ago. Excavation of these layers in 1995 yielded 12 human specimens, comprising 10 isolated teeth, a mandibular fragment, and a partial manual middle phalanx. This sample brings the inventory of human remains from the DK1 MSA to 27. Most of the 1995 specimens represent juvenile individuals: four are deciduous teeth, three of the permanent crowns exhibit little or no weal; and the mandible contains an unerupted permanent incisor: The preponderance of immature individuals in this sample is consistent with those excavated earlier Some of the DK1 crowns tend to be larger than most recent African homologues, and comparable to the teeth of penecontemporaneous populations from Eurasia, which might be expected for teeth of such antiquity. Other of the DK1 crowns, however; are smaller than the majority that have been sampled for the Late Pleistocene archaic inhabitants of Eurasia. The majority of morphological variants displayed by the DK1 crowns characterise the teeth of recent sub-Saharan Africans, and in some instances the resemblances between the DK1 and recent African teeth are in traits that differentiate sub-Saharan Africans from other geographic populations. The similarities between the teeth of the MSA inhabitants of DK1 and recent Africans, however do not necessarily signify modernity of the former, because these crown variants may also have characterised earlier populations from which the MSA peoples were derived. Currently available dental samples are inadequate to determine crown variant frequencies in earlier African (MSA or ESA) populations.