Ice age 'twins' found in ancient burial ground
Submitted by coldrum on Tuesday, 11 October 2005 Page Views: 7344
DigsCountry: Austria Two ice-age human infants, buried together with great ceremony, have been discovered on a hillside overlooking the Danube in Austria. The pair, who may well be biological twins, were found near Krems in northern Austria by Christine Neugebauer-Maresch of the Austrian Academy of Sciences and her colleagues.The remains have yet to be carbon-dated but are thought to be at least 27,000 years old, because other artefacts from the area have been dated to between 40,000 and 27,000 years old. During this period, which falls within the Upper Palaeolithic, Neanderthals were superseded by modern humans, who were developing increasingly sophisticated hunting abilities and forms of culture.
The babes were placed side by side in their grave and protected beneath a woolly mammoth's shoulder blade, which was propped up by pieces of mammoth tusk. The bodies were wrapped in a material such as animal hide that has since deteriorated and were covered with ochre.
Neugebauer-Maresch told New Scientist that more than 31 ivory beads were also found at the burial site. "They had been buried with much ritual - it is really very interesting," she says.
Structural remains
The "twins" were found on 21 September 2005 at a depth of five metres after speculative drilling of cores within a wider area had already yielded many structural remains and stone artefacts. These are, however, the first human remains to be found at the site.
The pair has been moved to Vienna's Natural History Museum, where they will be examined further and carbon-dated by Maria Teschler-Nicole. She will place the remains within a chamber with controlled humidity in order to limit further deterioration.
Teschler-Nicole has already found that both babies’ femurs measure 71 millimetres in length, which suggests they were newborn and also that the pair were related. "The probability that they are twins is high," she told New Scientist. "But we can't prove it without DNA or teeth fragments."
She says there may be insufficient organic material to extract useful DNA from the pair.
A computer-assisted tomography (CT) scan conducted at Vienna General Hospital has shown another set of beads concealed beneath one of the baby's heads.
Source: New Scientist
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