Kebara cave
The Kebara Cave is a karst cave that was visited during the Stone Age on the western steep slope of Mount Carmel in northern Palestine , south of Haifa , in Israel . It owes its importance above all to a burial of a Neanderthal man excavated in 1983 .
Archaeological research
The clearly visible cave on the western slope of the Carmel Mountains was first scientifically investigated by Francis Turville-Petre in 1931 , initially only digging in the upper layers ( Natufien , Kebaran , Upper Palaeolithic ). The most important archaeological find from the cave is the 60,000-year-old burial of a Neanderthal man (Kebara 2), which was made in 1983 at the edge of a pit dug in the 1960s. The skull-less jaw still had the hyoid bone , a U-shaped bone of the larynx skeleton, which is also present in today's people and suggests language ability. The man died between the ages of 25 and 35. There was no evidence of a cause of death on the bones. At 1.70 meters, the dead man was taller than the average European Neanderthal. The strong lower jaw with the complete set of teeth has the typical Neanderthal gap behind the molars. Kebara 2 is similar to skeletons from the Amud Cave (the tallest Neanderthal at 1.8 m) and the Tabun Cave (both in Israel) as well as Shanidar ( Iraq ), but its physique is more robust. There was also a fragmentary find of a child's skeleton (Kebara 1).
About 25,000 artifacts of the Aurignacien and Moustérien were found in the four meter thick cave deposits . The oldest levels yielded thousands of animal bones, mainly from gazelles and red deer. On the partially burned bones, there were cuts from stone tools . The middle layers contained Levallois stone artifacts and fireplaces. On top were Epi-Paleolithic relics of Natufia .
After Ofer Bar-Yosef and Bernard Vandermeersch, the Kebara Neanderthals must have come from Europe. The reason for the migration could be the glacial climate between 115,000 and 65,000 BC. That drove European Neanderthals to the Middle East, where they met anatomically modern humans (Homo sapiens) . The artifacts from Kebara resemble stone tools from the Qafzeh Cave in Israel. However, those buried there are clearly not Neanderthals. Why populations belonging to different species had the same culture remains a mystery.
The upper layers of the cave date from the Natufian period and have been dated to between 12,000 and 11,000 years ago. A communal grave contained the skeletal remains of 11 children and six adults. All adults buried in Kebara Cave were found to show signs of violence. A grown man had fragments of stone in his spine. Apparently, he did not survive the injury.
literature
- Ofer Bar-Yosef and Bernard Vandermeersch: Le squelette Moustérien de Kébara 2nd Éditions du Center National de la Recherche Scientifique, Paris 1991
- Naomi Porat, Henry P. Schwarcz, Hélène Valladas, Ofer Bar ‐ Yosef and Bernard Vandermeersch: Electron spin resonance dating of burned flint from Kebara Cave, Israel. In: Geoarchaeology. Volume 9, No. 5, 1994, pp. 393-407, doi: 10.1002 / gea.3340090504
- Asier Gómez-Olivencia, Alon Barash, Daniel García-Martínez et al .: 3D virtual reconstruction of the Kebara 2 Neandertal thorax. In: Nature Communications. Volume 9, Article No. 4387, 2018, doi: 10.1038 / s41467-018-06803-z
Individual evidence
- ^ Ofer Bar-Yosef , B. Vandermeersch, B. Arensburg, A. Belfer-Cohen, P. Goldberg, H. Laville, L. Meignen, Y. Rak, JD Speth, E. Tchernov, M. Tillier, S. Weiner : The Excavations in Kebara Cave, Mt. Carmel. In: Current Anthropology . Volume 33, Issue 5, 1992, pp. 497-550.
- ^ Francis Turville-Petre : Excavations in the Mugharet el-Kebarah. In: Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute. 62, 1932, pp. 271-276
- ↑ DAE Garrod , DM Bate: The Stone Age of Mount Carmel. Vol. I, Clarendon Press, Oxford 1937.
- ↑ F. Bocquentin, O. Bar-Yosef: Early Natufian remains: evidence for physical conflict from Mt. Carmel, Israel. In: Journal of Human Evolution. Volume 47, 2004, pp. 19-23.
Coordinates: 32 ° 34 '25 " N , 34 ° 58' 7.7" E