All posts tagged: Bavaria archaeology

Neanderthals began life more like humans than scientists thought

Neanderthals began life more like humans than scientists thought

Published by Jenni Sidey

Neanderthal babies have always been hard to study, mostly because their remains are so rare. That scarcity has left one of the oldest arguments in human origins unsettled: were Neanderthals following a fundamentally different developmental path from the start, or did the gap between them and modern humans open later? A set of fragile bones and milk teeth from Sesselfelsgrotte cave in Lower Bavaria now pushes that debate in a clearer direction. Using high-resolution micro-CT scans, an international team examined bone fragments from a Neanderthal fetus and two milk teeth from two young children who lived roughly 75,000 to 50,000 years ago. What they found suggests that, at least late in pregnancy, Neanderthals were developing in ways that looked remarkably familiar. “Our results indicate that both human forms progressed through strikingly similar growth processes, at least during the later stages of pregnancy,” said Prof. Dr. Thorsten Uthmeier, Chair of Prehistoric Archaeology at Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg. Prof. Dr. Thorsten Uthmeier, Chair of Prehistoric Archaeology at Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg. (CREDIT: Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg) The work adds weight to a broader …

Woolly mammoths were likely butchered by hunters and gatherers, study finds

Woolly mammoths were likely butchered by hunters and gatherers, study finds

Published by Jenni Sidey

A woolly mammoth lay for thousands of years in wet ground near the Danube, its ribs, foot bones, and a nearly 2.5-meter tusk sealed in place until construction crews in Bavaria uncovered them by chance. What looked at first like a remarkable Ice Age fossil soon turned into something rarer. It became direct evidence that people handled the carcass during one of the coldest and harshest chapters of the last glacial period. The partial skeleton was found at Taimering, near Regensburg in southern Germany, during excavations that had originally been aimed at medieval remains. Instead, workers and archaeologists recovered a large mammoth tusk and more than 70 bones and fragments. Most of them were ribs and bones from the hands and feet. The surfaces were preserved with unusual clarity because they had spent millennia in waterlogged sediments. “The mammoth’s tusk and bones were exceptionally well-preserved due to their millennia-long conservation in the wet soil environment,” says Dr. Christoph Steinmann, deputy head of the Department of Archaeological Heritage Preservation for Lower Bavaria/Upper Palatinate at the BLfD. …