Klasies River Caves

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The Klasies River Caves (also: Klasies River Mouth ) are a group of paleoanthropological and archaeological sites in South Africa . The caves are located about 500 meters east of and above the mouth of the eponymous river Klasies in the Eastern Cape province , not far from Humansdorp on the Tsitsikamma coast . Numerous hominine fossils from the Middle Stone Age have been found in the caves , which some researchers interpret as the oldest evidence of the presence of archaic Homo sapiens in South Africa.

The two larger caves and three abrises were first explored in 1967/68 by Ronald Singer and John Wymer . At that time, and during the excavations continued by Hilary Deacon from 1984, several find horizons from the Middle Stone Age, above them layers from the Later Stone Age , and between these two areas a sterile layer, caused by an elevated sea level, the swell of which the interior of the caves reached. The caves were also washed out by waves around two million years ago. One of the layers could be assigned to the Howieson's Poort Industry .

The bottom layer of the up to 30 meters thick deposits in the caves was created around 120,000 years ago; the Middle Stone Age layers above were determined to be up to 60,000 years old.

Among other things, ten individual teeth, five partially preserved lower jaws , two upper jaw fragments and around a dozen other skull fragments were discovered, as well as several bones from the area below the skull. The differences in size between comparable bones are unusually large, which can be attributed either to a particularly pronounced sexual dimorphism or to the fact that the cave was used alternately by several populations. Numerous bones show burns and cuts ; muscle tissue was probably scraped off from them; they come from a 110,000 to 100,000 year old layer and were found mixed with fleshed bones from various animal species. A 120,000 year old fireplace with remains of charred, starchy plant parts was also discovered.

For the caves, the UNESCO World Heritage status was requested in 2015 .

literature

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b c Entry Klasies River in: Bernard Wood: Wiley-Blackwell Encyclopedia of Human Evolution. Wiley-Blackwell, 2011, ISBN 978-1-4051-5510-6 .
  2. ^ Frederick E. Grine, Richard G. Klein and G. Philip Rightmire: Additional human fossils from Klasies River Mouth, South Africa. In: Journal of Human Evolution. Volume 35, No. 1, 1998, pp. 95-107, doi: 10.1006 / jhev.1998.0225 , full text (PDF)
  3. ↑ Ronald Singer and John Wymer: The Middle Stone Age at Klasies River Mouth in South Africa. University of Chicago Press, Chicago 1982, ISBN 978-0-2267-6103-9
  4. ^ A b The Emergence of Modern Humans: The Pleistocene occupation sites of South Africa. On: whc.unesco.org
  5. ^ G. Philip Rightmire, HJ Deacon, Jeffrey H. Schwartz and Ian Tattersall : Human foot bones from Klasies River main site, South Africa. In: Journal of Human Evolution. Volume 50, No. 1, 2006, pp. 96-103, doi: 10.1016 / j.jhevol.2005.08.010
  6. ↑ Cynthia Larbey et al .: Cooked starchy food in hearths approx. 120 kya and 65 kya (MIS 5e and MIS 4) from Klasies River Cave, South Africa. In: Journal of Human Evolution. Volume 131, 2019, pp. 210–227, doi: 10.1016 / j.jhevol.2019.03.015

Coordinates: 34 ° 6 ′ 29.2 ″  S , 24 ° 23 ′ 24.5 ″  E

Photo-request.svg
 Image wanted 
BW