Vindija Cave

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

The Vindija cave was formed in limestone that had formed around 10 million years ago in the Tortonian. It is now about 275 m above sea level. Your single, large chamber is about 50 meters long, 28 meters wide and 20 meters high partially. By 1878 it was first mentioned as an archaeological site; first excavations took place in 1928 in it, but the intensive search for fossils began only in the mid -1970s. Were discovered, among other numerous animal bones, including remains of wool rhino, saiga, horses (Equus germanicus ), Ren and cave bear.

The genetic material from the cells of a fossil cave bear from the Vindija cave belonged in 1999 to the first reconstructed using the polymerase chain reaction in parts of ancient DNA fragments of extinct creatures.

In addition to stone tools of the Mousterian and Aurignacian also bones of Neanderthals were recovered in different depth layers, including a fragment of a lower jaw. The recent findings of a G1 layer designated in 1999 dated to an age of only 28000-29000 years, identifying her as the youngest ever discovered Neanderthal fossils. 2006, this date but has been revised and called an age 32000-33000 years.

Neanderthal finds from deeper layers are partly 38,000, some 45,000 years old. From one of these 45,000 years old finds Svante Pääbo reported in May 2006 during a conference at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, his research group has succeeded, for this Fossil approximately one million base pairs - 0.03 percent - the DNA of a male Neanderthal to reconstruct; in November 2006, this work was published in the journal Nature.

A dated to an age of 38,310 ± 2,130 years bone fragment ( archive number Vi33.16 ) from the cave helped to decipher the mitochondrial DNA of Neanderthals. From the same fossil came also a part of that DNA, on the basis of a 60 per cent complete version of the Neanderthal genome has been reconstructed, its exact scientific analysis was published in 2010. Among other things, it has been argued in this study that there was gene flow from Neanderthals to modern humans. This gene flow caused according to the authors of the study, that to this day has a share of Neanderthal DNA between one and get four percent of the genome in the gene pool of the non-African population.