Mesmaiskaya Cave

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The Mezmaiskaya cave ( Russian Пещера Мезмайская ) is an archaeological locality in Russia , in Rajon Apsheronsk of Krasnodar region . In the karst cave , fossil remains of Neanderthals and very well-preserved animal remains were found.

View from the cave to the surrounding area

location

The Mesmaiskaya Cave is located about 1,310 meters above sea level in the northwestern Caucasus , about 65 kilometers northeast of Sochi , 50 kilometers southeast of Apsheronsk and 4.5 kilometers east of the village of Mesmai on the banks of the Sukhoi Kurdish river , a narrow tributary of the Kurdish river .

description

The cave is 10 meters high, 25 meters wide and 35 meters deep. The site was discovered in 1987 by the anthropologist Lyubow Golowanowa and excavated between 1987 and 2003 . The remains of 6,000 large mammals and numerous small vertebrates in seven layers from the Middle Paleolithic ( Moustérien ) and three layers from the Upper Paleolithic formed the found material of the cave. The faunistic remains showed a very low degree of weathering, many bones showed traces of stone tools and the effects of carnivores . Steppe wisent , West Caucasian ibex, and mouflon were the most common large mammals found. Finds of reindeer were made for the first time in the Caucasus. Although the remains of most of the smaller vertebrates appear to have entered the debris not through human activity but rather by predators such as owls , the majority of the remains of ungulates were likely brought into the cave as remains of the cave dwellers' prey during the Moustérien.

In 1993, Lyubov Golovanova discovered the carefully buried, almost completely preserved skeleton of a two-week-old male Neanderthal baby in the cave. 141 individual parts of the skeleton lay in an anatomical context on a large limestone block , overlaid by the oldest settlement layer, the Moustérien layer 3. The skeleton lay with the head to the north on its right side. After initially estimated to be 29,000 years old, analysis of accompanying finds and the overlying sediments later revealed an estimated age of 50,000 to 70,000 years, and in 2011 direct dating of the bones then found an age of 39,700 ± 1,100 14 C BP .

The 24 skull fragments of a second, one to two year old Neanderthal child from Moustérien layer 2 showed post-mortem deformations.

After a computer reconstruction of the infant skeleton , the anthropologists Marcia Ponce de León and Christoph Zollikofer from the University of Zurich found that the brain of the Neanderthal baby with a volume of around 400 cubic centimeters at birth was the same size as that of a modern human newborn. Comparisons with finds from other Neanderthal children up to the age of four, including two Neanderthal children from the Dederiyeh Cave in Syria who died at the age of 19 and 24 months, respectively, showed that the Neanderthal brain grew even faster during childhood than that of the today's Homo sapiens .

The virtual reconstruction of a Neanderthal birth, based on the Mesmaiskaja find and the basin of a Neanderthal woman from the Tabun Cave in the Carmel Mountains in Israel , showed that the birth canal of the Neanderthal mother was wider than that of a Homo-sapiens mother . However, the head of the Neanderthal newborn was slightly longer than that of a human newborn because of its robust face. The anthropologists at the University of Zurich came to the conclusion that the birth of the Neanderthals was probably a similarly difficult process as that of anatomically modern humans.

literature

  • Johannes Krause, Ludovic Orlando, David Serre, Bence Viola, Kay Prüfer, Michael P. Richards, Jean-Jacques Hublin, Catherine Hänni, Anatoli Derewianko, Svante Pääbo : Neanderthals in central Asia and Siberia. Nature , 449/18. October 2007, pp. 902-904

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b Igor Owchinnikow et al .: Molecular analysis of Neanderthal DNA from the northern Caucasus. Nature 404 2000, pp. 490-493.
  2. ↑ a b c d AR Skinner, BAB Blackwell, Sara Martin, A. Ortega, JIB Blickstein, LV Golovanova, VB Doronichev: ESR dating at Mezmaiskaya Cave, Russia . In: Applied Radiation and Isotopes . tape 62 , no. 2 , February 2005, p. 219-224 , doi : 10.1016 / j.apradiso.2004.08.008 .
  3. ↑ Gennady Baryshnikov, John F. Hoffecker, Robin L. Burgess: Palaeontology and Zooarchaeology of Mezmaiskaya Cave (Northwestern Caucasus, Russia) . In: Journal of Archaeological Science . tape 23 , no. 3 , May 1996, pp. 313-335 , doi : 10.1006 / jasc.1996.0030 .
  4. ↑ a b c d e f Christoph Zollikofer, Marcia Ponce de Leon: Surprising things about the development of the Neanderthals. University of Zurich, UZH News (September 9, 2008)
  5. ↑ a b Sonja Kastilan: Stone Age Cave in the Caucasus, three hundred square meters cold. Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung (November 14, 2009, accessed April 11, 2010)
  6. ^ Lyubov Golovanova: Anthropological findings about the Paleolithic of the North Caucasus ( Memento of the original from October 4, 2013 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. Nasledie, State Unitary Enterprise of the Ministry of Culture of the Stavropol Territory. (Russian) @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.nasledie.org
  7. ↑ Ron Pinhasi et al .: Revised age of late Neanderthal occupation and the end of the Middle Paleolithic in the northern Caucasus. In: Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences , pre-publication online May 9, 2011, doi : 10.1073 / pnas.1018938108

Coordinates: 44 ° 10 '  N , 40 ° 0'  E