Okladnikov Cave

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Entrance to the cave

The Okladnikov Cave ( Russian Пещера им. А.П. Окладникова ) is an archaeological and paleoanthropological site in Russia , in the mountains of the Russian Altai in southern Siberia . It was named after the Russian archaeologist Alexei Okladnikow . Human remains found in the cave prove that the Neanderthals reached Siberia; 2,000 km further east than previously assumed.

location

View from Siberiaachikha

The cave is located on the southwestern edge of the village of Sibiryachikha, about 20 km northwest of the district administrative center of Solonezhnye of the Altai region , in a limestone formation on the left bank of the Sibirka River, a narrow left tributary of the Anui .

description

The entrance to the cave faces south and is 14 m above the current level of the river. It consists of a complex of interconnected small caves, a rock overhang, a grotto and five galleries.

According to Andrei Krivoschapkin, senior researcher at the Institute of Archeology and Ethnography of the Siberian Department of the Russian Academy of Sciences , the bones were discovered as early as the mid-1980s, during excavations led by two members of the institute - Sergei Markin and Valeri Petrin - discovered. Among the artefacts to be assigned to the Moustérien , distributed over all seven cultural layers (strata) found, were three large bone fragments and five teeth; one premolar and four molars from different mandibles. These human remains were found to be radiocarbon dating from two adolescents and one adult who was over 24 years old when they died.

The upper arm bone ( humerus ) of one adolescent (OK1) was dated to 37,800 ± 450 BP , 34,860 ± 360 BP, and 29,990 ± 500 14 C-years BP with several radiocarbon dates. This humerus (OK1) as well as the femur (OK2) of the other adolescent could be assigned to the Neanderthal based on the mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) that was still preserved . The adult humerus, whose age was determined to be 24,260 ± 180 BP (corresponds to 27,073 ± 431 BC), only contained mtDNA from modern humans ( Homo sapiens ). Dating also speaks for a fairly reliable assignment of the adult individual to Homo sapiens , since the Neanderthals were already considered extinct at this time.

classification

Since 1938 in the mountains of Uzbekistan , in the Teschik-Tash cave , the skeleton of an eight to ten year old presumed Neanderthal child was recovered, this cave has been considered the easternmost place where Neanderthal bones were found.

In 2007, Svante Pääbo from the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig was able to identify DNA sequences known from European Neanderthals in two of the three Okladnikov fossils and in the bones from the Teschik-Tasch Cave. Pääbo and his colleagues examined DNA from the right thigh bone of the Neanderthal child from the Teschik-Tasch Cave and from the upper arm and finger bones of the fossils found in Siberia and compared them with the previously deciphered genome of 13 European Neanderthals. The similarity of the mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) of the Siberian and European Neanderthals indicated that they could not have been spatially separated for long. The boy from Teschik-Tasch was related even closer to the European Neanderthals than to the early humans from Siberia. These research results expanded the previously known distribution area of ​​the Neanderthal by around 2,000 km to the east. Whether the Neanderthals possibly penetrated as far as Mongolia or China has to be found out through further investigations of fossil bones.

A fossil finger bone from the nearby Denisova Cave was interpreted in two studies published in Nature in 2010 as evidence of a second, sympatric living homo population in the Altai (" Denisova man "), since that fossil was related to the mtDNA and the cell nucleus - DNA is neither identical to Neanderthals nor to Homo sapiens . There is currently no scientific consensus on the safety of lineages created using the molecular clock .

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Peter Neal Peregrine, Melvin Ember: Encyclopedia of Prehistory: Arctic and Subarctic . Springer Verlag, Dordrecht 2001, ISBN 0-306-46256-7
  2. ↑ Artyom Tunzow (October 2, 2007) Neanderthals conquered Gazeta Siberia (accessed June 28, 2009)
  3. ↑ a b Johannes Krause, Ludovic Orlando, David Serre, Bence Viola, Kay Prüfer, Michael P. Richards, Jean-Jacques Hublin, Catherine Hänni, Anatoly P. Derevianko, Svante Pääbo: Neanderthals in central Asia and Siberia. Nature, 449/18 October 2007 pp. 902-904 doi : 10.1038 / nature06193
  4. ↑ Thomas Bence Viola, Maria Teschler-Nicola, Katrin Schaefer, Anatoly P. Derewianko, Horst Seidler: Postcranial remains from Okladnikov Cave, Siberia. American Journal of Physical Anthropology, Supplement 46, 2008, pp. 214-215
  5. ↑ Calibration with CalPal online
  6. ↑ Sibylle Wehner-von Segesser The Neanderthals - even to be found in Siberia - comparisons of the genome of Asian and European fossils. Neue Zürcher Zeitung (accessed June 28, 2009)
  7. ↑ Johannes Krause, Qiaomei Fu, Jeffrey M. Good, Bence Viola, Michael V. Shunkov, Anatoli P. Derevianko and Svante Pääbo: The complete mitochondrial DNA genome of an unknown hominin from southern Siberia. Nature , Volume 464, No. 7290, 2010, pp. 894-897, doi : 10.1038 / nature08976
  8. ↑ David Reich et al. : Genetic history of an archaic hominin group from Denisova Cave in Siberia. In: Nature , Volume 468, No. 7327, 2010, pp. 1053-1060, doi : 10.1038 / nature09710

Coordinates: 51 ° 44 '  N , 84 ° 2'  E