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Kostyonki–Borshchyovo

(Redirected from Kostyonki (palaeolithic site))
For other places with the same name, see Kostenki.

The Kostyonki–Borshchyovo archaeological complex is an area where numerous Upper Paleolithic archaeological sites have been found, located around the villages of Kostyonki (also Kostenki) and Borshchyovo (also Borshchevo). The area is found on the western (right) bank of the Don River in Khokholsky District, Voronezh Oblast, Russia, some 25 km south of the city of Voronezh.[1] The 26 Paleolithic sites of the area are numbered Kostenki 1–21 and Borshchevo 1–5.

Kostyonki–Borshchyovo
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Location of Kostyonki–Borshchyovo (red dot), and contemporary cultures c. 40,000-30,000 BP
Coordinates51°23′09″N 39°03′06″E / 51.38583°N 39.05167°E / 51.38583; 39.05167
History
Foundedc. 40,000 BP
PeriodsPaleolithic

It is known for its high concentration of cultural remains of anatomically modern humans from the beginning of the Upper Paleolithic era, before 40,000 years ago.[2][3] Finds are on exhibit in situ, at the State Archaeological Museum–Reserve Kostyonki built atop the mammoth bone circle Kostenki 11.[4][5] Kostyonki is considered as belonging to the Aurignacian culture.

History

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Mammoth bones on exhibit in Kostyonki museum

Mammoth teeth were found at the site from an early time. Cornelis de Bruijn wrote in 1703:

"In the locality in which we were, to our great surprise, we found many elephant teeth, of which I kept one myself, for the sake of curiosity, but I can not understand how these teeth could get here. True, the Emperor [Peter I] told us that Alexander the Great, passing this river, as some historians assure, reached the small town of Kostenka, about eight versts from here, and that it could very well be that at that time several elephants had fallen, the remains of which are still here today."

The site is also mentioned by Samuel Gottlieb Gmelin in 1768. The settlement name Kostyonki itself is a derivation from кость "bone".

Kostenki-1 was excavated by I. S. Polyakov (1845–1887) in 1879. Further excavations during 1881–1915 were mostly searches for stone tools. Systematic excavations were performed from the 1920s, most notably those led by P.P. Efimenko during 1923–1938.

In the second half of the 20th century it was recognized that there were other sites in the neighbourhood, now labelled Kostenki-1 to Kostenki-21 and Borshchevo-1 to Borshchevo-5. The most famous of these are Kostenki-12 (Volkovska) and Kostenki-14 (Markina Gora).

A 25,000-year-old bone circle structure of at least 60 mammoths, measuring over 12.5 metres (41 ft) in diameter, was discovered at Kostenki in 2020.[6]

Sites

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Kostyonki terrain model

Kostenki-1/2 (site Kostenki-1, layer 2), Kostenki-1/3, Kostenki-6 (Streletskaya), Kostenki-11 and Kostenki 12/3 below the volcanic CI tephra layer are associated to the nontransitional local "Strelets culture", analogous to early Upper Paleolithic cultures from central and western Europe such as the Szeletian culture. This initial cultural development might be attributable to local Neanderthals.[7] Ornaments predating the volcanic eruption, found at Kostenki 17/2 ("Spitsyn culture", 38–32 ka),[8] were apparently perforated by a hand-operated rotary drill or drills; these may suggest that the population was technologically capable of preparing for a volcanic winter.[9] Just above the ash layer sewing needles were found .[10]

Kostenki 1/1, Kostenki 4/2, Kostyonki 8/2 and Kostenki 21/3 belong to the eastern Gravettian (24 to 22 ka). Kostenki 2, Kostenki 3, Kostenki 11-1a and Kostenki-19 belong to the Zamyatino culture (22 to 17 ka). Kostenki 8/2 (Telmanskaya) is eponymous of "Telman culture".[11]

 
Map of the Kostenki prehistoric sites

As of 2016, archaeological work is done at Kostenki-14 (Markina Gora), Kostenki-6 (Streletskaya), Kostenki-15 (Gorodtsovskaya), Kostenki-16 (Ugljanka), Kostenki-17 (Spitsynskaya) and Kostenki-21 (Gmelinskaya).[8]

Human remains

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Venus figurine of Kostyonki, Gravettian, ca. 25.000 BP

Some of the earliest directly dated human remains from this site are dated to 32,600 ± 1,100 14C years and consist of a tibia and a fibula, with traits classifying the bones as European early modern humans.[12]

In 2009, DNA was extracted from the remains of a male hunter-gatherer from Kostenki-12 who lived circa 30,000 BP and died aged 20–25. His maternal lineage was found to be mtDNA haplogroup U2. He was buried in an oval pit in a crouched position and covered with red ochre.[13] Kostenki 12 was later found to belong to the patrilineal Y-DNA haplogroup C1* (C-F3393).[14]

Kostenki-14

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Reconstruction of Homo Sapiens from the Kostenki 14 site, by M.M. Gerasimov. State Archaeological Museum-Reserve Kostenki

A male from Kostenki-14 (Markina Gora), who lived approximately 38,700–36,200 year ago,[15] was also found to belong to mtDNA haplogroup U2. His Y-DNA haplogroup was C1b* (F1370).

 
Phylogenetic position of ancient Upper Paleolithic Eurasian specimens.

The Kostenki-14 genome represents early evidence for the separation of Europeans and East Asian lineages. He was found to have a close relationship to both Paleolithic European and Siberian hunter-gatherers, such as the Sungir specimens from western Russia, the Peștera Muierii woman (34 kya) in Romania, or the "Mal'ta boy" (24 kya) of south-east Siberia (Ancient North Eurasian) and to the later Mesolithic hunter-gatherers of Europe (Western Hunter-Gatherer) and western Siberia, as well as with a basal population ancestral to Early European Farmers, but not to East Asians.[16][17][18][19][20] Kostenki-14 showed that the main ancestral components of contemporary Europeans were likely already genetically differentiated and related at least 36,200 years ago, with the modern European genomic structure dating back to the Upper Paleolithic.[16] Kostenki-14 had some level of ancient Neanderthal admixture, which has been dated as going back to circa 54,000 BP.[15]

Volcanic ash

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A layer of Campanian volcanic ash, earlier dated to about 45,000 years ago, has been found above some of the finds, showing that humans inhabited the site before this.[7][21][9]

Currently, the Campanian Ignimbrite eruption of the Phlegraean Fields volcano is dated to about 39 kya. The explosion of 500 cubic kilometers (120 cu mi) ignimbrite was the largest in the last 200,000 years of European history.[22]

References

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  1. ^ "Государственный археологический музей-заповедник Костёнки".
  2. ^ "The era of the great European cultures of the Northern-type hunters". iabrno.cz. Czech Academy of Sciences, the Institute of Archaeology in Brno, The Center for Paleolithic and Paleoethnological Research. Retrieved 26 March 2018.
  3. ^ "Kostenki-12, a memorial to Upper Paleolithic culture in Eastern Europe" (in Russian). Institute of History of Material Culture, RAS. Archived from the original on 12 July 2006. Retrieved 12 January 2007.
  4. ^ St. Fleur, Nicholas (17 March 2020). "This Mysterious Ancient Structure Was Made of Mammoth Bones". The New York Times. Retrieved 17 March 2020.
  5. ^ "This is one of the largest Ice Age structures made of mammoth bones". 17 March 2020.
  6. ^ "Oldest Circular Structure Discovered – and It's Made of Mammoth Bones". Haaretz. 17 March 2020.
  7. ^ a b Anikovich, M. V.; et al. (1 January 2007). "Early Upper Paleolithic in Eastern Europe and implications for the dispersal of modern humans". Science. 315 (5809): 223–226. Bibcode:2007Sci...315..223A. doi:10.1126/science.1133376. ISSN 0036-8075. PMID 17218523. S2CID 21428180.
  8. ^ a b Синицын А. А. Ранний верхний палеолит Восточной Европы:украшения и вопросы эстетики () ed. Г. А. Хлопачев, St. Petersburg 2016.[1] Archived 26 June 2018 at the Wayback Machine
  9. ^ a b Anikovich, M. A.; et al. (2007). "Early Upper Paleolithic in Eastern Europe and Implications for the Dispersal of Modern Humans". Science. 315 (5809): 223–226. Bibcode:2007Sci...315..223A. doi:10.1126/science.1133376. PMID 17218523. S2CID 21428180. Retrieved 12 January 2007.
  10. ^ Hoffecker, John F. (12 January 2007). BBC Science in Action, 12 January 2007.
  11. ^ Рогачев А. Н., Аникович М. В., Дмитриева Т. Н. 1982. Костёнки 8 (Тельманская стоянка) // Палеолит Костёнковско-Борщёвского района на Дону.
  12. ^ Higham, T.; et al. (January 2006). "Revised direct radiocarbon dating of the Vindija G1 Upper Paleolithic Neanderthals". Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America. 103 (3): 553–557. Bibcode:2006PNAS..103..553H. doi:10.1073/pnas.0510005103. ISSN 0027-8424. PMC 1334669. PMID 16407102.
  13. ^ "DNA analysed from early European". BBC News. 1 January 2010. Retrieved 8 May 2010.
  14. ^ Fu 2016.
  15. ^ a b Churchill, Steven E.; Keys, Kamryn; Ross, Ann H. (August 2022). "Midfacial Morphology and Neandertal–Modern Human Interbreeding". Biology. 11 (8): 1163. doi:10.3390/biology11081163. ISSN 2079-7737. PMC 9404802. PMID 36009790. Ancient DNA from Kostenki 14, a 38.7–36.2 Ka-old modern human from the western portion of the Russian Plain, contains longer segments of Neandertal DNA than are found in living Europeans, producing an estimated hybridization date of ca. 54 Ka
  16. ^ a b A. Seguin-Orlando; et al. (6 November 2014). "Genomic structure in Europeans dating back at least 36,200 years". Science. 346 (6213): 1113–1118. Bibcode:2014Sci...346.1113S. doi:10.1126/science.aaa0114. PMID 25378462. S2CID 206632421.
  17. ^ Yang, Melinda A.; Fan, Xuechun; Sun, Bo; Chen, Chungyu; Lang, Jianfeng; Ko, Ying-Chin; Tsang, Cheng-hwa; Chiu, Hunglin; Wang, Tianyi; Bao, Qingchuan; Wu, Xiaohong; Hajdinjak, Mateja; Ko, Albert Min-Shan; Ding, Manyu; Cao, Peng (17 July 2020). "Ancient DNA indicates human population shifts and admixture in northern and southern China". Science. 369 (6501): 282–288. Bibcode:2020Sci...369..282Y. doi:10.1126/science.aba0909. ISSN 0036-8075. PMID 32409524. S2CID 218649510.
  18. ^ Yang, Melinda A.; Gao, Xing; Theunert, Christoph; Tong, Haowen; Aximu-Petri, Ayinuer; Nickel, Birgit; Slatkin, Montgomery; Meyer, Matthias; Pääbo, Svante; Kelso, Janet; Fu, Qiaomei (23 October 2017). "40,000-Year-Old Individual from Asia Provides Insight into Early Population Structure in Eurasia". Current Biology. 27 (20): 3202–3208.e9. doi:10.1016/j.cub.2017.09.030. ISSN 0960-9822. PMC 6592271. PMID 29033327.
  19. ^ Svensson, Emma; Günther, Torsten; Hoischen, Alexander; Hervella, Montserrat; Munters, Arielle R.; Ioana, Mihai; Ridiche, Florin; Edlund, Hanna; van Deuren, Rosanne C.; Soficaru, Andrei; de-la-Rua, Concepción; Netea, Mihai G.; Jakobsson, Mattias (26 July 2021). "Genome of Peştera Muierii skull shows high diversity and low mutational load in pre-glacial Europe". Current Biology. 31 (14): 2973–2983.e9. doi:10.1016/j.cub.2021.04.045. hdl:10810/52864. ISSN 0960-9822. PMID 34010592. S2CID 234793812.
  20. ^ Sikora, Martin; Seguin-Orlando, Andaine; Sousa, Vitor C.; Albrechtsen, Anders; Korneliussen, Thorfinn; Ko, Amy; Rasmussen, Simon; Dupanloup, Isabelle; Nigst, Philip R.; Bosch, Marjolein D.; Renaud, Gabriel; Allentoft, Morten E.; Margaryan, Ashot; Vasilyev, Sergey V.; Veselovskaya, Elizaveta V. (3 November 2017). "Ancient genomes show social and reproductive behavior of early Upper Paleolithic foragers". Science. 358 (6363): 659–662. doi:10.1126/science.aao1807. ISSN 0036-8075.
  21. ^ "Time Out of Africa" (PDF). Archived from the original (PDF) on 3 March 2016. Retrieved 21 November 2014.
  22. ^ De Vivo, B.; G. Rolandi; et al. (1 November 2001). "New constraints on the pyroclastic eruptive history of the Campanian volcanic Plain (Italy)". Mineralogy and Petrology. 73 (1–3). Springer Wien: 47–65. Bibcode:2001MinPe..73...47D. doi:10.1007/s007100170010. S2CID 129762185.
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