If you ever needed a reason to visit Ukraine, consider spelunking: the country has a number of natural caves that still hide undiscovered treasures. One of these caves, Buran-Kaya, was the stage of an important archaeological discovery: on 6m² of the cave, almost 200 human remains were found in a Upper Paleolithic stratum with no evidence of an intentional burial pit.
The discovery is important, as data relating the early settlement of modern humans in Eastern Europe is relatively scarce, with Buran-Kaya and Siuren as the only sites in the northern Black Sea region where a Middle to Upper Paleolithic archaeological sequence is well preserved.
Buran-Kaya is a shelter-cave, overhanging the Burulcha river in the Belogorsk region, discovered in 1990 by A. Yanevich and excavated up to 2001 by a team under the direction of A. Yanevich and A. Marks. Image courtesy, PLoS ONE.
Archaeologists found here human remains, body ornaments, ochre fragments, and faunal and paleobotanical remains, as well as Lithic artefacts attributed to the Gravettian cultural tradition. The collection of the lithic assemblage is made of 23,027 artefacts including retouched tools such as end-scrapers, burins and numerous backed microliths. Body ornaments include mammoth ivory beads, 1 engraved plate made of mammoth ivory and 35 marine and fresh water perforated shells. According to the research article published on PLoS ONE, the lack of blank, roughed-out, waste products or mammoth remains suggest off-site production and subsequent import of the finished mammoth ivory ornaments.
A high proportion of burned bones were found (25% of total number of remains), with high range of color diversity (from brown to white).
The human fossils discovered at Buran-Kaya represent the oldest direct evidence of the presence of modern humans in far southeastern Europe. The analysis of these remains offered new insights into the subsistence of the earliest European Anatomically Modern Humans (AMHs). For instance, the modifications observed on human bones represent the oldest evidence of postmortem treatments of the dead by early modern humans in Europe. To read the complete research article, follow this link.