El Sidron Cave

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The Sidrón Cave ( Spanish Cueva de El Sidrón ) is a branched limestone - cave in northern Spain , in the highlands of Asturias , in the municipality of Piloña , in the Parroquia Borines , one kilometer west of Vallobal. In this cave, prehistoric rock carvings were discovered, and recreational researchers discovered the fossil remains of a group of Neanderthals while exploring the cave system in March 1994 .

Finds

In total, more than 1800 skull fragments, lower jaws, bones and teeth as well as around 400 Moustérien stone tools and stone chips have been found. The remains come from at least 12 Neanderthals: three male and three female adults as well as three teenagers and three children aged around two, five and eight years. In all of them, the teeth show clear signs of lack of nutrition. A fragment of the skull and a piece of a humerus showed traces of blows with hand axes , an indication that they might have died a violent death. Cuts and cracks on the bones indicate cannibalism . Shortly after the death of the group, the floor of the cave collapsed: bones, earth and stones fell 20 meters into a limestone chamber washed out by underground water. In 2013, the age of the fossils was dated to 48,400 ± 3200 years BP .

Genetic analyzes indicate that the group members were related to each other. In detail, the exact relationships have not yet been fully clarified. The group is assumed to be a family, however, as two of the women were directly related to the group's children and could therefore have been their mothers. It is significant that the three adult men had the same mitochondrial DNA, but the three adult women had different mitochondria . This means that the men came from the same group, but the women from three different groups. Carles Lalueza-Fox from the Institute for Evolutionary Biology in Barcelona, ​​who carried out the analyzes, interprets this as a social practice of the Neanderthals, as it also occurs in modern hunter-gatherer cultures, namely that women leave their original groups while the men remained in the father's group. However , it has not yet been conclusively clarified whether this implies a consistently patrilineal social practice of the Neanderthals. Lalueza-Fox speaks of an at least patrilocal mating behavior of the Neanderthals. The lineages within the group based on the mtDNA analysis also make a Neanderthal birth rate of approx. 3 years appear plausible.

The researchers working with Carles Lalueza-Fox from the Institut de Biologia Evolutiva in Barcelona analyzed the mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) of three different Neanderthal bones from the El Sidron cave that were found in 2006 (441, 1253 and 1351c ). Two Neanderthals had (1253 and 1351c) is the same, enabling the language mutation in the area of exon 7 of the FOXP2 - gene as modern man. Further research on bones from El Sidron Cave revealed that some Neanderthals had a gene that enabled them to recognize bitter tastes. Lalueza-Fox and colleagues found a variant of the MC1R gene in the bones of two Neanderthals from the El Sidron cave (1252) and from Monti Lessini , which does not exist in modern humans and is a mixture of red and dark pigmentation of hair and skin regulates. Both Neanderthals had light skin and reddish hair.

literature

  • Trinidad Torres et al .: Dating of the hominid (Homo neanderthalensis) remains accumulation from El Sidrón cave (Borines, Asturias, North Spain): an example of multi-methodological approach to the dating of Upper Pleistocene sites. In: Archaeometry. Volume 52, No. 4, 2010, pp. 680-705, doi: 10.1111 / j.1475-4754.2009.00491.x

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Stephen S. Hall: The Last Neanderthals. In: National Geographic Germany , edition 11/2008.
  2. ↑ a b c Carles Lalueza-Fox et al .: Genetic evidence for patrilocal mating behavior among Neandertal groups. In: PNAS . Volume 108, No. 1, 2011, pp. 250-253, doi: 10.1073 / pnas.1011553108 .
  3. ^ Rachel E. Wood, Thomas FG Higham et al .: A new date for the Neanderthals from El Sidrón cave (Asturias, northern Spain). In: Archaeometry. Volume 55, No. 1, 2013, pp. 148-158, doi: 10.1111 / j.1475-4754.2012.00671.x .
  4. ↑ People: Carles Lalueza-Fox. Pompeu Fabra University, Barcelona.
  5. ↑ Interview with Carles Lalueza-Fox in: The Dark Secret of the Neanderthals ( Memento from September 3, 2014 in the Internet Archive ). ARTE , broadcast on August 30, 2014.
  6. ↑ Kambiz Kamrani: Neandertals have the same mutations in FOXP2, the language gene, as modern humans. Anthropology.net, October 18, 2007.
  7. ↑ Carles Lalueza-Fox et al .: Neandertal Evolutionary Genetics: Mitochondrial DNA Data from the Iberian Peninsula - Molecular Biology and Evolution. In: Molecular Biology and Evolution. Volume 22, No. 4, 2005, pp. 1077-1081, doi: 10.1093 / molbev / msi094 .
  8. ^ Johannes Krause, et al .: The derived FOXP2 variant of modern humans was shared with Neandertals. In: Current Biology. Volume 17, No. 21, 2007, pp. 1908–1912, doi: 10.1016 / j.cub.2007.10.008 , full text (PDF; 273 kB) .
  9. ↑ Carles Lalueza-Fox, et al .: Bitter taste perception in Neanderthals through the analysis of the TAS2R38 gene. In: Biology Letters. Volume 5, No. 6, 2009, pp. 809-811, doi: 10.1098 / rsbl.2009.0532 .
  10. ↑ Carles Lalueza-Fox, et al .: A Melanocortin 1 Receptor Allele Suggests Varying Pigmentation Among Neanderthals. In: Science . Volume 318, No. 5855, 2007, pp. 1453-1455, doi: 10.1126 / science.1147417 .

Coordinates: 43 ° 23 ′ 1 ″  N , 5 ° 19 ′ 44 ″  W.