Iswich Man

Face of the first European: The Newspaper story...

Quote: This clay sculpture portrays the face of the earliest known modern European - a man or woman who hunted deer and gathered fruit and herbs in ancient forests more than 35,000 years ago. It was created by Richard Neave; one of Britain's leading forensic scientists, using fossilized fragments of skull and jawbone found in a cave seven years ago.

His recreation offers a tantalizing glimpse into life before the dawn of civilization. It also shows the close links between the first European settlers and their immediate African ancestors. It was made for the BBC2 series The Incredible Human Journey. This will follow the evolution of humans from the cradle of Africa to the waves of migrations that saw Homo sapiens colonize the globe. (The program will be shown on BBC2 at 9.30pm on May 10).

The head is based on remains of one of the earliest known anatomically modern Europeans. The lower jawbone was discovered by potholers in Pestera cu Oase, the "cave with bones", located in the southwestern Carpathian Mountains of Romania in 2002. The rest of the fragments were found the following year. The bones were carbon-dated to between 34,000 and 36,000 years ago when Europe was occupied by two species of human. They were the Neanderthals, who had arrived from Africa tens of thousands of years earlier, and the more recent modern humans, also known as Cro-Magnons. Although the skull is similar to a modern human head, it has a larger cranium, is more robust and has larger molars. Fossil experts are also unsure if the skull was male or female.

The Kostenki Sites, Russia

The Kostenki - Borshevo sites (34,000 B.C.) are a group of more than twenty settlements from the same culture, on the right bank of the Don River, south of Voronezh. The basic excavations were conducted in the 1920s - 1930s by P. Yefimenko, and in the 1940s - 1960s by A. N. Rogachev.

The villages of Kostenki and Borshevo contained five cultural layers. In the upper layer were preserved the remains of dwellings with hearths located along the central longitudinal axis of the dwellings, together with storage pits. Flint tools and hoes made from mammoth tusks, bone digging implements, a baton from deer horn, and about forty female statuettes made from both ivory and marl/limestone, figurines of a bear, cavelion and anthropomorphous marl heads. Triangular flint tools are found in the lowermost layer with a concave base, retouched with a pressure process.

At Kostenki II (Zamyatnina site) were found the remains of a round dwelling made of mammoth bones, seven or eight metres across, with the fireplace in the center.

At Kostenki IV (Aleksandrovka site) there was preserved in the upper of two cultural layers, the remainders of two round dwellings approximately six meters in diameter with the hearth at the center of each. Among the findings here were ground, drilled disks of slate. In the bottom layer there were two long dwellings, with a length of 34m and 23m, and a width of 5.5m, in which were found flint leaf-like tips processed by pressure retouching. In the second layer were found fragments of human bones, partially burnt, as well as flint miniature plates (microliths?) and needle shaped points (burins?).

Kostenki XI contained not less than five cultural layers. In the upper layer the remains of a round dwelling 9 metres in diameter made from large mammoth bones were discovered. In the lower layers there were interesting findings of triangular flint tips, analogous to those found in the lower layer of Kostenki I.

Kostenki XIV (Markina Mountain, Markina Gora), contained four cultural layers.

At Kostenki XV (Gordocovskaja site) the ochred burial of a child of about six years was found. With this burial were flint and bone tools, and over 150 drilled teeth of the Arctic Fox.

Borshevo II contained three cultural layers, dated from the end of the late Palaeolithic through to the Mesolithic. In the top layer, the camp of a temporary settlement of horse hunters, mammoth bones were absent, but there were reindeer bones. The flint tools were of the microlith type, which could have been used for arrow heads.