Malta (Russia)

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Engraved mammoth on a mammoth bone from the site in Malta. Today at the Hermitage .

Mal'ta ( Russian Мальта ) is a paleolithic site in the Angara Valley , 80 km northwest of Irkutsk in the Russian Federation .

During excavations under the direction of Mikhail Gerasimov , a Upper Paleolithic settlement was excavated over an area of ​​600 m² , which was probably inhabited around 24,000-21,000 years ago. Semi-underground round houses were found in Malta. The foundations were made of stone; Roofs were supported by animal bones and consisted of intertwined reindeer antlers. In addition to various tools and weapons made of flint, various works of art are particularly worth mentioning in the finds. Among them are animal and human figures carved from bones and mammoth ivory ( Venus figurines from Malta ), animal representations carved in stone, small plates decorated with abstract patterns and pieces of jewelry. Children's graves and the graves of skinned foxes give rare indications of the religious ideas of the residents of the time.

In 2013 the genome (see Y-haplogroup R * ) of the approximately 24,000-year-old boy from Mal'ta was published.

literature

  • Chester S. Chard: Northeast Asia in Prehistory. The University of Wisconsin Press, Madison 1974. ISBN 0-299-06430-1 , pp. 20 ff.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Maanasa Raghavan, Pontus Skoglund et al. a .: Upper Palaeolithic Siberian genome reveals dual ancestry of Native Americans. In: Nature . Volume 505, 2014, pp. 87-91, doi: 10.1038 / nature12736 .

Coordinates: 52 ° 50 ′ 23.6 "  N , 103 ° 31 ′ 25.6"  E