Üçağızlı Cave

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The Üçağızlı Cave is an archaeological site on the southern coast of Turkey in the Hatay Province , southwest of Antakya . The partially collapsed limestone cave is now about 18 meters above sea level and has been explored by Turkish and US scientists since the 1990s.

Snail shells and mussel shells from Ksar Akil

The oldest layers of the find were dated between 44,000 and 41,000 years ago and contained numerous stone tools . Furthermore, hundreds of pierced snail shells were discovered in the cave, which are interpreted as the remains of body jewelry ("pearl necklaces") and are also at least 40,000 years old. They are considered to be the oldest pieces of jewelry of anatomically modern humans ( Homo sapiens ) that were recovered outside of Africa and resemble comparable artifacts of Upper Paleolithic small art from the Ksar Akil site in Lebanon , ten kilometers northeast of Beirut, about 250 kilometers away .

The settlement of the Üçağızlı Cave extended for around 12,000 years.

The cave is considered an archaeological link between sites in the Levant and Romania ( Peştera cu oasis ) in the reconstruction of the spread of man from Africa to Europe. However, so far only ten teeth have been recovered from layers of finds of different ages, which are attributed to anatomically modern humans, but because of their different ages are not very informative for the paleoanthropological reconstruction of the former residents.

literature

  • Steven L. Kuhn et al .: The early Upper Paleolithic occupations at Uçağizli Cave (Hatay, Turkey). In: Journal of Human Evolution. Volume 56, No. 2, 2009, pp. 87-113, doi: 10.1016 / j.jhevol.2008.07.014
  • Steven L. Kuhn: Questions of Complexity and Scale in Explanations for Cultural Transitions in the Pleistocene: A Case Study from the Early Upper Paleolithic. In: Journal of Archaeological Method and Theory. Volume 20, No. 2, 2013, pp. 194–211, doi: 10.1007 / s10816-012-9146-3 , full text (PDF)
  • Steven L. Kuhn et al .: New perspectives on the Initial Upper Paleolithic: the view from Üçağızlı Cave, Turkey. Chapter 9 in: P. Jeffrey Brantingham et al. (Ed.): The Early Upper Paleolithic beyond Western Europe. University of California Press, Berkeley 2004, pp. 113-128
  • Mary C. Stiner et al .: Early Upper Paleolithic shell beads at Üçağızlı Cave I (Turkey): Technology and the socioeconomic context of ornament life-histories. In: Journal of Human Evolution. Volume 64, No. 5, 2013, pp. 380-398, doi: 10.1016 / j.jhevol.2013.01.008 . Illustrations of the snail shell

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b Chris Stringer : The Origin of Our Species. Penguin / Allen Lane, 2011, pp. 94-98, ISBN 978-1846141409
  2. ^ Steven L. Kuhn: Upper Paleolithic raw material economies at Üçağızlı cave, Turkey. In: Journal of Anthropological Archeology. Volume 23, No. 4, 2004, pp. 431-448, doi: 10.1016 / j.jaa.2004.09.001
  3. ^ Richard G. Klein: The Human Career: Human Biological and Cultural Origins. 3rd edition 2009, p. 646, ISBN 978-0-226-43965-5
  4. ^ Steven L. Kuhn et al .: Ornaments of the earliest Upper Paleolithic: New insights from the Levant. In: PNAS . Volume 98, No. 13, 2001, pp. 7641-7646, doi: 10.1073 / pnas.121590798
  5. ^ University of Arizona: Human remains. Overview of the teeth found in the cave