Skull of Rhünda
The skull of Rhünda comes from the area of the north Hessian village Rhünda (district of Felsberg ) in the Schwalm-Eder district . The fossil skull without a lower jaw , which was initially identified as the remains of a Neanderthal woman, is a rare find from around 10,000 BC. BC and thus from the late Upper Palaeolithic . It concerns a man who lived in a post-glacial cold period and who lived mainly on fish.
Discovery and Backup
The skull was discovered on June 20, 1956 by the ten-year-old students Reinhart Wendel and Günther Otys on the bank of the stream, about 80 cm below the surface of the earth, when they were out with their teacher Eitel Glatzer the day after a storm. The site was on a newly created bank of the Rhünda near its confluence with the Schwalm .
The skull was presumably washed down from the woods above the village and over the years rotted, decayed and then sintered with lime. The layers of the find consisted of marly calcareous tuff on calcareous alluvial loess and basalt rubble . The local teacher, who recognized the value of the discovery, brought the find to Eduard Jacobshagen , anatomist and professor at the University of Marburg, on July 22, 1956 .
Dating, priority nutrition through fish
On August 26, 1956, Eduard Jacobshagen presented the skull find at the international congress 100 Years of Neanderthals in Düsseldorf as a new find of the Homo sapiens neanderthalensis type . Jacobshagen was of the opinion that the skull was that of a Neanderthal woman, the so-called "Frau von Rhünda", which he justified with the gracefulness of the bones, which was striking for a Neanderthal man, as it was shown after cleaning and putting together. But already at the congress a debate arose as to whether it was actually the skull of a Neanderthal man, especially since the classification as a woman was also based on this assumption. At the time, the skull was considered a "sensational find".
In 1962, the anthropologists Gerhard Heberer and Gottfried Kurth from Göttingen published that the Rhünda skull was a representative of modern humans (Homo sapiens) . Their assignment was based on research into recomposition of the skull. In 1962, tufa specimens from the found layer of the skull were dated to 8365 ± 100 years BP using the C14 method , which would have dated it to the Mesolithic , i.e. the time of post-glacial hunters, gatherers and fishermen. A dating on the bone material of the skull was not carried out; instead, an age of 8,300 years was confirmed again in 1990 based on the analysis of the layers of the find. However, this dating could only be related to the sintering of lime.
The paleontologist Wilfried Rosendahl dated the skull to an age of 12,000 years in 2002. The AMS-14C method was used for exact dating. Rosendahl sent a 2 g skull sample to Groningen , to the local Centrum voor Isotopoen Onderzoek of the Rijksuniversity. There a geological age of 10,000 ± 80 years BP was proven, with which the skull could be assigned to the Younger Dryas . When calibrated, this results in a date of 10.137–10.073 or 10.015–9.747 BC. In addition, it could be shown that it was a man.
Collagen examinations showed that the man from Rhünda had fed on freshwater fish to a large extent.
The find is kept in the Hessisches Landesmuseum Kassel ; a copy is in the Gensunger Museum.
literature
- Dorothée G. Drucker, Wilfried Rosendahl, Wim Van Neer, Mara-Julia Weber, Irina Görner, Hervé Bocherens: Environment and subsistence in north-western Europe during the Younger Dryas: An isotopic study of the human of Rhünda (Germany) , in: Journal of Archaeological Science: Reports 6 (2016) 690-699.
- Wilfried Rosendahl: The man from Rhünda - a new ice age hunter from Hessen , in: Anthropologie in Rhünda, Schwalm-Eder-Kreis, pp. 21-23.
- Wilfried Rosendahl: News on the age of the fossil human skull from Rhünda (Schwalm-Eder-Kreis), Hessen , in: Archäologisches Korrespondenzblatt 32.1 (2002).
- Gerhard Heberer , Gottfried Kurth : Findings, relative dating and type of the Upper Pleistocene skull from Rhünda (Hesse) , in: Anthropologie 1 (1962) 23–28.
- Gerhard Heberer: The end of a "Neanderthal" , in: Homo 13 (1962) 152–161.
- Gottfried Kurth: The Entzauberung des Rhünda-Neanderthals , in: Kosmos 58 (1962) 465-469.
- Eduard Jacobshagen : The skull rest of the woman from Rhünda (Kassel district) , in: Anatomischer Anzeiger 104 (1957) 64-87.
Web links
Remarks
- ↑ Eduard Jacobshagen: The skull remnant of the woman from Rhünda (Kassel district) , in: Anatomischer Anzeiger 104 (1957) 64–87.