A team of archaeologists discovered a mark in the clay that could be a knee mark left by one of the builders of a stalagmite circle. This was found in the Bruniquel cave in France.
Num, published in 2016 in Naturesix structures composed of stalagmites, or pieces of stalagmites, organized in a circular shape were identified in this cave next to remains of fire combustion.
In total, there were 400 stalagmiteswith an estimated global weight of 2.2 tons, being placed to form a continuous line. These structures would reach 112 meters.
There are about 175 thousand yearsNeanderthals ventured into caves, broke stalagmites and used them to build circular structures.
Later, the bears settled in the place and erased almost all the footprints and traces that were on the cave floor, with the exception of one print in the clay, which could be the knee mark of a neanderthal — which has now been the subject of a new study.
According to , to analyze the mark found in the clay, the researchers will ask a group of people to kneel down to see the marks that remain after contact with them.
“It’s just a hypothesis“, it says Sophie Verheydenresearcher at the Royal Belgian Institute of Natural Sciences. “To be sure of this, we need a lot of knee impressions to compare.”
These marks may contain DNA from skin cells, hair or blood. As a rule, this degrades quickly, but if the knee imprint in the cave mineralized quickly, some of the DNA may have been preserved.
Once the A wise man was not found in Europe around 175 thousand years ago, the people responsible for the circles in the stalagmites must have been Neanderthals.
“We are not aware of any other human beings present during this period,” says Verheyden.
Some of the broken stalagmites are more than 20 centimeters thick baseso it is unlikely that they were broken by bears. Furthermore, the researchers were able to locate the bases of these and date the break to the same time that the stalagmite circles were built.
Both the structures and the broken stalagmites were dated through measurement of radioactive isotopes in the calcite deposits that cover the rock in the caves.
Scientists are developing ways to identify stalagmites based on their mineral composition, so they can determine which part of the cave the broken ones came from and whether, for example, the stalagmites were brought from distant parts of the cave (or even other caves) to create the circles.
They still hope to find a way to see through the calcium carbonate layers that cover parts of the floor. The findings were presented this Monday at a meeting of the European Geosciences Unionin Vienna.
