Mezmaiskaya cave
The Mesmaiskaja Cave (Russian Пещера Мезмайская ) is an archaeological site in Russia, the Rajon Apscheronsk the Krasnodar region. In the karst cave fossil remains of Neanderthals and very well-preserved faunal remains were found.
Location
The Mesmaiskaja Cave is located about 1,310 meters above sea level in the northwestern Caucasus, about 65 kilometers northeast of Sochi, 50 kilometers southeast of Apscheronsk and 4.5 kilometers east of the village on the banks of the river Mesmai Sukhoi Kurdschips, a narrow tributary of the Kurdschips.
Description
The cave is 10 meters high, 25 meters wide and 35 meters deep. The site was discovered in 1987 by the anthropologist Lyubov Golowanowa and excavated 1987-2003. Partial very well -preserved remains of 6,000 large mammals and numerous small vertebrates in seven layers of the Middle Palaeolithic ( Mousterian ) and three layers of the Upper Paleolithic formed the archaeological material of the cave. The faunal remains showed a very low degree of weathering, many bones showed traces of stone tools and effects of predators. Steppe bison, ibex and mouflon Westkaukasischer were the most commonly encountered large mammals. Finds of reindeer could be detected for the first time in the Caucasus. Although the remains of most of the smaller vertebrates apparently came not from human activities, but by predators such as owls in the deposits, the majority of the remains of ungulates were probably brought as remnants of the prey of the cave dwellers during the Mousterian in the cave.
Lyubov Golowanowa discovered in 1993 in the cave the carefully buried, almost completely preserved skeleton of a two- week-old male Neanderthal infant. 141 individual parts of the skeleton were in anatomical connection on a large block of limestone, overlain by the oldest settlement layer, the Mousterian layer 3 The skeleton was lying with his head to the north on his right side. After it was initially estimated to 29,000 years, the analysis of incidental findings and the overlying sediments later an estimated age of 50000-70000 years, and in 2011 was a direct dating of the bones then an age of 39,700 ± 1,100 14C BP.
The 24 cranial fragments of a second, one to two year old Neanderthal child from the Mousterian layer 2 had post-mortem deformation.
After a reconstruction of the infant skeleton on the computer found the anthropologist Marcia Ponce de León and Christoph Zollikofer of the University of Zurich that the brain of the Neanderthal babies with a volume of about 400 cubic centimeters at birth the same size was like that of a modern human newborn. Comparisons with findings from other Neanderthal children up to the age of four, including two neanderthal child from the Dederiyeh Cave in Syria, who died at the age of 19 or 24 months, showed that the Neanderthal brain still grew faster than that of during childhood today's Homo sapiens.
The virtual reconstruction of a Neanderthal birth, based on the Mesmaiskaja - Fund and the basin of a Neanderthal woman from Tabun Cave in Israel, showed that the birth canal of the Neanderthal mother was more than that of a homo- sapiens - mother. However, the head of the Neanderthal newborn was because of his rugged face slightly longer than that of a human newborn. Anthropologists at the University of Zurich came to the conclusion that the birth in Neandertals probably a similarly difficult process was like when anatomically modern humans.