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Neanderthal bones have been discovered in the cave of Ciemna, where researchers have been digging for decades.
Credit: Paweł Valde-Nowak
A Neanderthal child had a very bad day about 115,000 years ago. The child is dead – that's for sure – and the bones were engulfed and digested by a prehistoric giant bird, according to Polish archaeologists.
However, it is unclear whether the giant bird killed the child before the macabre party or if the child died of another cause before the bird searched the remains, said the archaeologists.
Paweł Valde-Nowak, professor of archeology at the Jagiellonian University of Krakow, Poland, said in a statement that his phalanges (finger bones) had passed "through the digestive system of a fat bird". "This is the first known example of this ice age." [In Photos: Bones from a Denisovan-Neanderthal Hybrid]
The discovery of the fingers bones of the Neanderthal child is an important discovery, especially because the bones, discovered in the cave of Ciemna, are the oldest human remains ever discovered in Poland.
Until now, the oldest known human remains in Poland were three Neanderthal molars from the Stajnia Cave dating from between 52,000 and 42,000 years ago. Neanderthals (Homo Neanderthalensis) lived in Eurasia between about 300,000 and 35,000 years ago and are the closest relatives missing from modern man. (The Neanderthals' extinction date is uncertain According to a 2006 study by Nature, Neanderthals may have lived about 24,000 years ago, although these individuals were probably among the last in their history. kind.)
An analysis of the recently analyzed finger bones revealed that the child would probably be dead between 5 and 7 years old, Valde-Nowak said. Bones 0.4 inches long (1 centimeter) are themselves porous and dotted with dozens of sieve-like holes, he added.
The tiny Neanderthal finger bones are 0.4 inches long (1 centimeter).
Credit: Barbara Drobniewicz
But given their poor state of preservation, the bones are not suitable for DNA analysis, said Valde-Nowak and his colleagues.
"But we do not doubt that it is Neanderthal remains, as they come from a very deep layer of the cave, a few meters away [yards] Valde-Nowak said: "This layer also contains typical stone tools used by the Neanderthal."
In addition, Neanderthals appear to have used the cave seasonally, he said. Researchers have been studying Ciemna Cave for decades. There they discovered a few years ago the bones of the child (as well as some old animal bones), but it is only in 2018 that a new analysis revealed that these bones belonged to a Neanderthal. .
"It's a unique find," Valde-Nowak said. "Only fossil bone fragments belonging to members of the family of modern man (Homo sapiensResearchers have also uncovered Neanderthal tools – such as scrapers, which can be used for cutting and scraping – on the banks of the Vistula river in Poland. All of these Neanderthal discoveries come from southern Poland, indicating that the region was beneficial to Neanderthals, unlike northern Poland, which was covered by a glacier during the last ice age.
The research, which is not yet published, is expected to appear later this year in the Journal of Paleolithic Archeology.
Originally posted on Live Science.
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