Tabun Cave

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Tabun Cave: second cave entrance from the right or third from the left

The Tabun Cave ( German  oven cave ) is a cave in the Nahal Me'arot nature reserve in the Carmel Mountains ( Israel ), just under 20 kilometers south of Haifa . The cave is an important finding place of bones and tools of the Neanderthals . The approximately 25-meter-thick sequence of layers contains found layers of the Old and Middle Paleolithic , which are about 500,000 years old at the base. The youngest layers are around 40,000 years old. In 2012 the cave was added to the UNESCO World Heritage List .

Discovery story

The cave was discovered by British archaeologist Dorothy Garrod and was first explored between 1929 and 1934. Later excavations (1967–1972) were carried out under the direction of Arthur Jelinek in the lower strata, which can be assigned to the Acheuléen , Amudien and Jabrudien . The lower strata were re- examined by Avraham Ronen ( University of Haifa ) in the 1990s .

Finds

Five hand axes from Tabun, excavated 1929-1934, on display in the British Museum in London

The layers of finds of the Moustérie are particularly significant in terms of their density . The burial of a presumably female Neanderthal man (Tabun C1 or Tabun 1) from layer B or C of the cave has been dated to an age of 80,000–120,000 years. She was discovered by a local worker named Yusra. The Neanderthal lower jaw Tabun 2, which is completely dentate except for one left incisor (I1), is almost the same age . The age of other isolated teeth from the B-layers was determined by means of ESR and uranium-thorium dating . These confirmed a radiometric age of 80,000–90,000 years. However, the margin of error of the data from the same stratigraphic units when comparing the radiometric methods of ESR and TL is estimated to be considerable.

Tabun 1 is kept in the Natural History Museum , London , Tabun 2 in the Rockefeller Museum , Jerusalem .

In a layer 16 meters deep, burned stones were found, which were dated to an age of 350,000 years and were interpreted as evidence of regular fire.

Web links

Commons : Tabun Cave  - Collection of pictures, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Rainer Grün, Chris Stringer: Tabun revisited: revised ESR chronology and new ESR and U-series analyzes of dental material from Tabun C1. In: Journal of Human Evolution. 39, 2000, pp. 601-612, doi : 10.1006 / jhev.2000.0443 .
  2. ↑ Dov Zviely, Ehud Galili, Avraham Ronen, Amos Salamon, Zvi Ben-Avraham: reevaluating the tectonic uplift of western Mount Carmel, Israel, since the middle Pleistocene. In: Quaternary Research. 71, 2009, pp. 239–245, doi : 10.1016 / j.yqres.2008.11.008 .
  3. ↑ Garrod, DAE, Bate, DMA: The Stone Age of Mount Carmel I: Excavations at the Wadi El-Mughara. Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1937.
  4. ↑ Arthur Jelinek, William R. Farrand, Georg Haas, A. Horowitz, Paul Goldberg: New excavations at the Tabun Cave, Mount Carmel, Israel, 1967–1972. A preliminary report. In: Paléorient 1, 2, 1973, pp. 151-183.
  5. ↑ Avraham Ronen, Alexander Tsatskin: New interpretation of the oldest part of the Tabun cave sequence, Mount Carmel, Israel. In (H. Ullrich, Ed.) Man and Environment in the Paleolithic. ERAUL, vol. 62, 1995, pp. 265-281.
  6. ^ Henry P. Simpson, John J. Schwarcz, Christopher B. Stringer: Neanderthal skeleton from Tabun: U-series data by gamma-ray spectrometry. In: Journal of Human Evolution. 35, 1998, pp. 635-645, doi : 10.1006 / jhev.1998.0252 .
  7. ^ Tabun 1 , Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History.
  8. ^ Bernard Wood : Wiley-Blackwell Encyclopedia of Human Evolution. Wiley-Blackwell, 2011, ISBN 978-1405155106
  9. ^ Alfredo Coppa, Rainer Grün, Chris Stringer, Stephen Eggins, Rita Vargiu: Newly recognized Pleistocene human teeth from Tabun Cave, Israel. In: Journal of Human Evolution. 49, 2005, pp. 301-315, doi : 10.1016 / j.jhevol.2005.04.005 .
  10. ^ AR Millard: A critique of the chronometric evidence for hominid fossils: I. Africa and the Near East 500-50 ka. In: Journal of human evolution. Volume 54, Number 6, June 2008, pp. 848-874, ISSN  0047-2484 . doi : 10.1016 / j.jhevol.2007.11.002 . PMID 18201747 .
  11. ↑ Ron Shimelmitz et al .: 'Fire at will': The emergence of habitual use fire 350,000 years ago. In: Journal of Human Evolution. Volume 77, 2014, pp. 196–203, doi: 10.1016 / j.jhevol.2014.07.005

Coordinates: 32 ° 40 ′ 13.8 "  N , 34 ° 57 ′ 55.8"  E