Istanbul, August 23 (HNA) – “Üçağızlı II Cave” is a Middle Palaeolithic settlement site situated on the Mediterranean coast of Hatay province. The cave, which is partially collapsed, has been dated to between 75,000 and 42,000 years ago using the uranium-series dating method. In this study, faunal remains and the flint tool industry recovered from the Büst stratum during the 2020 excavation work at the Üçağızlı II Cave were examined. Typical faunal remains of the Mediterranean were identified in the Büst stratum, whilst traces of ornamentation were detected for the first time in mollusc specimens.
According to the research paper prepared by İsmail Baykara, Ece Eren Kural, Ayşen Açıkkol and Mustafa Kenan Agras from Istanbul University, ‘The stone tool finds are characterised by the Levallois industry, and a flake-dominated production pattern has been identified. Within the flint tool industry group, unipolar Levallois cores, Mousterian and Levallois points, and edge scrapers are prominent. These features indicate that the flint tool industry obtained from the Büst layer belongs to the Levantine Middle Palaeolithic culture and resembles the ‘Tabun Type C’ industry of this culture. This situation indicates a spread towards the north of the Levant during the Upper Pleistocene Period.”
The new evidence comes from Üçağızlı II Cave, on a stretch of coastline just north of Syria that served as a prehistoric corridor between the Levant (an area of land east of the Mediterranean) and Eurasia. Although the team found only teeth and a partial jawbone within the cave, they were able to distinguish between the remains of Neanderthals and H. sapiens by analyzing the internal structure of the fossilized teeth. Meanwhile, they dated the sediment at the site using optically stimulated luminescence, a technique that reveals how long ago buried mineral grains last saw sunlight.
The team, including Prof. Dr. Derya Silibolatlaz Baykara, Prof. Dr. Davut Turan, Clément Zanolli, Wataru Morita ve Naoki Morimoto, found that the Neanderthals had lived within the cave between approximately 77,000 and 59,000 years ago, while Homo sapiens stayed there between about 59,000 and 47,000 years ago. Despite the different time periods, the layers from both of these periods show “substantially uniform hunting-gathering strategies and lithic technology,” showing how similar the Neanderthals and H. sapiens were in their hunting-gathering strategies and stone-tool use, the team wrote in the study.
What’s more, Neanderthals and H. sapiens got raw materials, such as flint, from the same local sources and hunted the same prey: wild goats (Capra aegagrus), fallow deer (Dama mesopotamica), roe deer (Capreolus capreolus) and wild boar (Sus scrofa). Layer after layer also turned up 29 shells of a small marine snail, Columbella rustica, carried into the cave not for food but seemingly as ornaments. Some were pierced as if meant to be strung, and one shell dating to the Neanderthal occupation showed signs of deliberate heating that altered its color.
“Our findings indicate a deep level of cultural interaction,” study co-author Naoki Morimoto, a paleoanthropologist at Kyoto University, said in a statement. “These two distinct but closely related human groups were not just adapting to the same environment: they were probably sharing symbolic preferences.”