Baishiya cave

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The Baishiya Cave (白 石崖 溶洞) is a paleoanthropological and archaeological site in the northeastern highlands of Tibet . It is located in the area of greater community Ganjia in circles Xiahe of Autonomous Prefecture of Gannan Tibetan , People's Republic of China . The karst cave became internationally known in 2019 as the site of the 160,000 year old Xiahe lower jaw of the Denisova people ; these fossil sites was also the first evidence the Denisova people outside of the Altai Mountains in Siberia located Denisova Cave and the oldest known evidence of the presence of a representative of Hominini in the highlands of Tibet.

location

The Baishiya Cave is located at an altitude of 3,280 meters on the south side of the Dalijia Mountains (Dalijia Shan), on the edge of the Ganjia Basin , near the confluence of the Jiangla River into the Yangqu . About their projects a tall white cliff of limestone up.

description

The Baishiya Cave, washed out of a limestone formation, is more than a kilometer long. Several chambers open behind its ten meter high and 20 meter wide entrance. Jean-Jacques Hublin , co-author of the description of the Xiahe lower jaw published in 2019, noted in an accompanying article that the large, dry and relatively warm cave was a good place to live - especially during the ice age cold phases .

The cave has been a Buddhist sanctuary for a long time and is now also a popular destination for tourists.

Fossil finds

The cave has long been known as a depository of " dragon bones ", which were ground up by local people and used as traditional Tibetan medicine . Presumably because the fossil resembles the lower jaw of a modern human, it was spared this use. However, an unknown monk took the lower jaw with him and gave it to the 6th Gungthang Rinpoche of Labrang Monastery , who made it available to Lanzhou University in Lanzhou in 1980 .

During excavations in the cave from 2016 stone tools and animal bones with cut marks were recovered. At the same time, the scientific investigation of the lower jaw began in 2016 in cooperation between researchers from Lanzhou University and the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology . The Max Planck Society summarized their 2019 results as follows: "Our protein analysis showed that the Xiahe lower jaw belonged to a population that was closely related to the Denisova people from the Denisova Cave ." The uranium thorium -Dating the calcareous crusts on the lower jaw showed an age of approximately 160,000 years.

Due to the special characteristics of the preserved molars and their roots, which differ from those found in Neanderthals , the Chinese researchers now hope to be able to identify further specimens from the archived hominine fossils that can be assigned to the Denisovans.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b c Fahu Chen et al .: A late Middle Pleistocene Denisovan mandible from the Tibetan Plateau. In: Nature. Online pre-publication from May 1, 2019, doi: 10.1038 / s41586-019-1139-x
  2. ^ A b c Jean-Jacques Hublin: How We Found an Elusive Hominin in China. On: sapiens.org from May 1, 2019
  3. ↑ Denisovans were the first human form in the highlands of Tibet. On: mpg.de from May 1, 2019
  4. ↑ Ann Gibbons: First fossil jaw of Denisovans finally puts a face on elusive human relatives. On: sciencemag.org from May 1, 2019

Coordinates: 35 ° 26 ′ 53 ″  N , 102 ° 34 ′ 17 ″  E