Vindija cave

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Vindija cave

Vindija cave.jpg
Location: Hrvatsko Zagorje , Croatia
Height : 275  m
Geographic
location: 		46 ° 17 '58 "  N , 16 ° 4' 14"  E Coordinates: 46 ° 17 '58 "  N , 16 ° 4' 14"  E
Vindija Cave (Croatia)
Vindija cave
Geology: limestone
Particularities: Neanderthal fossils

The Vindija Cave is a paleoanthropological and archaeological site in the Hrvatsko Zagorje in northern Croatia . The cave is located nine kilometers northwest of Ivanec and 20 kilometers west of the center of Varaždin . It became known as the site of the supposedly youngest fossils of Neanderthals in Central and Eastern Europe.

description

The Vindija Cave was created in limestone that was formed around 10 million years ago in the Tortonium . Today it is about 275 m above sea level. Its only large chamber is around 50 meters long, 28 meters wide and sometimes 20 meters high. It was first mentioned as an archaeological site in 1878; The first excavations took place in 1928, but the intensive search for fossils did not begin until the mid-1970s. Among other things, numerous animal bones were discovered, including the remains of woolly rhinos , saigas , horses ( Equus germanicus ), reindeer and cave bears .

In 1999, the genetic material from the cells of a fossil cave bear from the Vindija cave was one of the first aDNA fragments of extinct organisms to be reconstructed in parts using the polymerase chain reaction .

Neanderthal finds

In addition to stone implements from the Moustérien and the Aurignacien , bones of Neanderthals were also recovered from layers of different depth , including a fragment of a lower jaw. The finds from a layer known as G 1 were dated in 1999 to an age of only 28,000 to 29,000 years, which at the time identified them as the supposedly youngest Neanderthal fossils ever discovered. In 2006 this date was revised and given an age of 32,000 to 33,000 years. A new dating in 2017 finally revealed an age of more than 40,000 years for the finds, which were first dated in 1999, from which it was deduced that all Neanderthal finds from this cave are older than the first colonization of Eastern Europe by anatomically modern humans ( Homo sapiens ).

Neanderthal finds from deeper layers are partly 38,000, partly 45,000 years old. During a conference at the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory in May 2006 , Svante Pääbo reported on one of these 45,000-year-old finds that his group had succeeded in reconstructing around one million base pairs - 0.03 percent - of the DNA of a male Neanderthal from this fossil ; in November 2006 this work appeared in the journal Nature .

A bone fragment (archive number Vi33.16) from the cave, dated to an age of 38,310 ± 2,130 years, helped to decipher the mitochondrial DNA of the Neanderthal man in 2008 . Part of the DNA used to reconstruct a 60 percent complete version of the Neanderthal genome, the exact scientific analysis of which was published in 2010, also came from the same fossil. Among other things, the authors of this study argued that there was a gene flow from Neanderthals to anatomically modern humans. This flow of genes has resulted in a proportion of Neanderthal DNA between one and four percent of the genome in the gene pool of the non-African population. In October 2017, the almost complete genome of a Neanderthal woman who lived around 50,000 years ago was finally reconstructed (archive number Vi33.19). A comparison with the only similarly fully reconstructed Neanderthal genome from the Denissowa Cave in the Altai Mountains revealed differences of only 1.6 deviations per 1000 base pairs , which means that these two individuals were genetically closer to each other than any two, people living today is the case. From this it was concluded that the Neanderthals lived in a very small population. At the same time, the proportion of Neanderthal DNA in the genetic make-up of people living outside Africa was now shown to be 1.8 to 2.6 percent.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Milford H. Wolpoff : Upper Pleistocene Human Remains From Vindija Cave, Croatia, Yugoslavia. In: American Journal of Physical Anthropology. Volume 54, 1981, pp. 499-545, full text (PDF)
  2. ^ Ivor Janković et al: Vindija Cave and the Modern Human Peopling of Europe. In: Collegium Antropologicum. Volume 30, No. 3, 2006, pp. 457–466, full text (PDF)
  3. ^ AD Greenwood et al .: Nuclear DNA sequences from late Pleistocene megafauna. In: Molecular Biology and Evolution. Volume 16, 1999, pp. 1466–1473, full text (PDF; 149 kB)
  4. ↑ Fred H. Smith et al .: Direct radiocarbon dates for Vindija G 1 and Velika Pećina Late Pleistocene hominid remains. In: PNAS . Volume 96, No. 22, 1999, pp. 12281-12286, doi: 10.1073 / pnas.96.22.12281 , full text
  5. ↑ Tom Higham et al .: Revised direct radiocarbon dating of the Vindija G 1 Upper Paleolithic Neandertals. In: PNAS. Volume 103, No. 3, 2006, pp. 553-557, doi: 10.1073 / pnas.0510005103
  6. ↑ Thibaut Devièse et al .: Direct dating of Neanderthal remains from the site of Vindija Cave and implications for the Middle to Upper Paleolithic transition. In: PNAS. Volume 114, No. 40, 2017, pp. 10606-10611, doi: 10.1073 / pnas.1709235114 , full text
  7. ↑ Rex Dalton: Neanderthal DNA yields to genome foray. In: Nature , Volume 441, 2006, pp. 260-261, doi : 10.1038 / 441260b
  8. ^ Richard E. Green et al .: Analysis of one million base pairs of Neanderthal DNA. In: Nature. Volume 444, 2006, pp. 330-336, doi : 10.1038 / nature05336
  9. ^ Richard E. Green et al .: A Complete Neandertal Mitochondrial Genome Sequence Determined by High-Throughput Sequencing. In: Cell . Volume 134, No. 3, 2008, pp. 416-426, doi : 10.1016 / j.cell.2008.06.021
  10. ↑ eurekalert.org of February 12, 2009: First version of the Neanderthal genome completed.
  11. ^ Richard E. Green et al: A draft sequence of the Neandertal Genome. In: Science . Volume 328, 2010, pp. 710-722, doi : 10.1126 / science.1188021
  12. ↑ Kay Prüfer et al .: A high-coverage Neandertal genome from Vindija Cave in Croatia. In: Science. Volume 358, No. 6363, 2017, pp. 655–658, doi: 10.1126 / science.aao1887
    Is your Neandertal DNA making your belly fat? Ancient genome offers clues. On: sciencemag.org of October 5, 2017, doi: 10.1126 / science.aaq1320
  13. ↑ A high-quality Neandertal genome sequence. On: eva.mpg.de , accessed on October 6, 2017