Cova Gran de Santa Linya

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Cova Gran de Santa Linya, 2016

The Cova Gran de Santa Linya ( Catalan for 'Great Cave of Santa Linya'), or Cova Gran for short , is an archaeological site in the foothills of the southeastern Pyrenees in the Catalan province of Lleida , Spain . The cave is 385 meters above sea level near the municipality of Les Avellanes i Santa Linya , above the Ebro valley, on the left side of the Sant Miquel gorge , a valley that drains to the Noguera Pallaresa . The cave has only been known to archaeologists since 2002 and has been explored since 2004, but so far only a few square meters have been excavated and nothing lying on the ground has yet been reached. At the western edge of the cave, several layers of soil could be distinguished, which, based on the stone tools recovered , suggest a settlement of initially Neanderthals and later “modern” humans ( Homo sapiens ).

cave

The cave - an abri  - has a floor area of ​​more than 2500 square meters and is around 92 × 83 meters in size at its widest points. Their height is up to 25 meters. It was washed out by a river from a limestone formation ( Bona Formation ), which was formed in the Upper Cretaceous . The bottom consists of around 3 to 9 meters thick sediments , which were partly deposited by water, partly blown in and have remained largely unchanged since their deposition.

Settlement of the cave by Neanderthals and modern humans could be proven primarily on the basis of various charcoal finds in soil layers of different depths with the help of radiocarbon dating for the period from 41,308 ± 3979 to 31,230 ± 260 years ago ( cal BP ), and also for the modern humans until the early Bronze Age .

Finds

The archaeologists of the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona described the fact that they were able to trace the chronological sequence of settlement by Neanderthals and anatomically modern humans in the cave as particularly significant ; The cave is one of the very few sites in Europe that was populated by individuals of the genus Homo shortly before and shortly after the Neanderthals became extinct .

Several thousand stone tools and cuts from the Aurignacian culture were discovered in the upper soil layers, while numerous stone tools and cuts from the Moustérien culture with typical features of the Levallois technique were discovered in the deeper soil layers . Accurate radiocarbon dating of the strata revealed that the earliest traces of modern humans are 40,000 to 37,500 years old (cal BP) and the last traces of Neanderthals are 43,000 years (cal BP). Between these layers of the find lies a “sterile” layer without any traces of settlement. The researchers conclude that there was no immediate change in the local population from Neanderthals to Homo sapiens in this cave either .

In addition, several shells of marine snails from the Mediterranean Sea about 150 kilometers away were discovered, which were dated to an age of 31,230 ± 260, 30,881 ± 216, 29,643 ± 244 and 26,066 ± 349 years (each cal BP).

A repopulation of the cave can only be proven for the time before 20,000 to 18,000 years (cal BP), i.e. for the late Solutréen / early Magdalenian as well as for the time before around 7000 to - at the excavation status in 2012 and also here on the basis of charcoal finds 4500 years (cal BP).

Web links

literature

  • Jorge Martínez-Moreno, Rafael Mora, Ignacio de la Torre: The Middle-to-Upper Palaeolithic transition in Cova Gran (Catalunya, Spain) and the extinction of Neanderthals in the Iberian Peninsula. In: Journal of Human Evolution. Volume 58, No. 3, 2010, pp. 211-226, doi: 10.1016 / j.jhevol.2009.09.002

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Jorge Martínez-Moreno et al .: La Cova Gran de Santa Linya i el poblament humà del vessant sud dels Pirineus al Plistocè superior i al Holocè. In: Tribuna d'Arqueologia. Volume 69, 2007, pp. 69–92, full text (PDF) ( Memento from September 8, 2011 in the Internet Archive )
  2. ^ Alfonso Benito-Calvo et al .: Sedimentological and archaeological fabrics in Palaeolithic levels of the South-Eastern Pyrenees: Cova Gran and Roca dels Bous Sites (Lleida, Spain). In: Journal of Archaeological Science. Volume 36, No. 11, 2009, pp. 2566-2577, doi: 10.1016 / j.jas.2009.07.012 , full text (PDF) ( Memento from September 8, 2011 in the Internet Archive )
  3. ^ Rafael Mora et al .: Chrono-stratigraphy of the Upper Pleistocene and Holocene archaeological sequence in Cova Gran (south-eastern Pre-Pyrenees, Iberian Peninsula). In: Journal of Quaternary Science. Volume 26, No. 6, 2011, pp. 635–644, doi: 10.1002 / jqs.1486 , full text (PDF)
  4. ↑ When did the first 'modern' human beings appear in the Iberian Peninsula? On: eurekalert.org of March 15, 2010

Coordinates: 41 ° 55 ′ 37.7 "  N , 0 ° 48 ′ 45.8"  E