Pontnewydd Cave
| Pontnewydd Cave
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 Look into the cave |
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| Location: | St Asaph , Wales , UK | |
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Geographic location: |
53 ° 13 '37 " N , 3 ° 28' 34" W | |
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The Pontnewydd Cave , also Bontnewydd called, is a cave in the north of Wales , by the northernmost remains of Neanderthals became known.
The cave was examined from 1978 by scientists from the University of Wales under the direction of Stephen Aldhouse Green (1945-2016). During the excavations, teeth and part of the upper jawbone of a boy of about eleven were found. The human remains have been dated to an age of approximately 225,000 to 230,000 years. A total of 17 teeth from at least five individuals were found. Less than a kilometer away, a similar stratigraphy was found in the Cefn Caves , but without human remains.
In addition to human traces, remains of the cold-age fauna were found, such as reindeer or woolly rhinos , which, however, are only 41,000 to 28,000 years old and thus belong to the last cold period . In contrast, the remains of a wolf belong to the oxygen isotope level 7, to which the Neanderthal remains can also be assigned, and which date from around 243,000 before today. In addition, there were remains of Dicerorhinus hemitoechus , an extinct rhinoceros species , as well as of the hippopotamus (Hippopotamus amphibius) and the forest elephant (Palaeoloxodon antiquus) . Remains of a species already similar to the modern leopard (Panthera pardus) were also found in the cave - leopards from this period can only be found in Bleadon Hill in Great Britain .
literature
- Stephen Aldhouse-Green, Rick Peterson, Elizabeth A. Walker: Neanderthals in Wales. Pontnewydd and the Elwy Valley Caves , Oxbow Books, 2012.
- H. Stephen Green: Pontnewydd Cave. A Lower Palaeolithic Hominid Site in Wales. The First Report , Amgueddfa Genedlaethol Cymru, 1984.
Web links
Remarks
- ↑ Early Neanderthal jaw fragment, c. 230,000 years old , Gathering the Jewels. The website for Welsh cultural history (The National Library of Wales et al.), Archive.org, February 10, 2015.
- ↑ Chris Stringer : Homo Britannicus. The Incredible Story of Human Life in Britain , Allen Lane, 2006, p. 152.
- ↑ Mel Davies: Cave archeology in North Wales , in: Trevor D. Ford (Ed.): Limestones and Caves of Wales , Cambridge University Press, 2011, pp. 92-101, here: p. 100.
- ^ Paul Pettitt , Mark White: The British Palaeolithic. Human Societies at the Edge of the Pleistocene World , Routledge, 2012, pp. 377-381.
- ↑ Andrew P. Currant: The mammalian remains , in: Green HS. 1984. Pontnewydd Cave. A Lower Palaeolithic Hominid Site in Wales: the First Report , Quaternary Studies Monograph 1 (1984) 177-181.
- ↑ Mel Davies: Cave archeology in North Wales , in: Trevor D. Ford (ed.): Limestones and Caves of Wales , Cambridge University Press, 2011, pp. 92-101, here: p. 93.
- ↑ Stephen Green, Elizabeth Walker: Ice Age Hunters. Neanderthals and Early Modern Hunters in Wales , National Museum of Wales, Cardiff 1991, p. 24.
- ^ Paul Pettitt, Mark White: The British Palaeolithic. Human Societies at the Edge of the Pleistocene World , Routledge, 2012, p. 232.