Paleoanthropologists have analyzed a tooth that was found back in 1961 among a collection of materials from the Akhshtyr cave site located in the Caucasus. Although it was previously believed that the tooth belonged to a sapiens, scientists have rejected this hypothesis. It seems that the find is associated with a representative of some extinct evolutionary line different from the Neanderthals. The scientists published the results of their study in the journal Archaeology, Ethnography and Anthropology of Eurasia.
The first archaic people (Homo erectus) came to the Caucasus 1.8 million years ago, as is convincingly demonstrated by numerous finds from the Georgian Dmanisi. At the same time, archaeologists have so far excavated very few anthropological finds in this region, relating to later eras, preceding the appearance of people of a modern anatomical type here. Although there are exceptions. For example, in the Mezmaiskaya cave, located in the south of the Krasnodar region, scientists discovered the remains of three Neanderthals and even isolated DNA from them.
Meanwhile, this does not mean that representatives of other types of ancient people could not visit the region located at the junction of the Middle East, Central Asia and Europe. Perhaps, information about this will now be supplemented by a find from the Akhshtyr cave site, which is located in the Adler district of Sochi. The first archaeological studies of this site took place in the 1930s under the leadership of the famous Soviet archaeologist Sergei Zamyatnin. The expedition discovered a rich collection of materials, the earliest of which belonged to the Mousterian era, that is, the Middle Paleolithic.
Anthropologist Alisa Zubova from the Kunstkamera and her colleagues from St. Petersburg devoted an article to one of the finds from the cave. According to the scientists, back in 1961, while analyzing a collection of animal remains from this monument, researchers recognized a human tooth and determined that it belonged to a representative of our species. But the analytical methods available at that time did not actually allow us to unambiguously determine whether this was actually the case.
Now, scientists have analyzed the tooth in detail, which is a large permanent second molar of the upper jaw belonging to an adult. Using various methods, including studying the internal structure of the tooth, they compared the morphological features of the find with similar molars of representatives of many species: early and late sapiens, Neanderthals, Denisovans, various middle and late Pleistocene people from China, Homo erectus, and so on.
The analysis showed that the tooth had a number of archaic morphological features. Apparently, it did not belong to either a modern human or a Neanderthal. No similar molars have been found in Europe yet. It was most similar to late archaic people from China, and in some features to the Denisov-4 tooth from the Altai cave of the same name, as well as to a sample from the Israeli cave Manot, the species status of which remains uncertain.
It is difficult to draw far-reaching conclusions from one discovery. However, the researchers have carefully suggested that perhaps some archaic evolutionary line of ancient people was present in the Caucasus, which could well have been of Asian origin. But it will be possible to confirm or refute this only after new data accumulates.
Just recently, N + 1 reported on the first reliably confirmed skull of a Denisovan. To do this, scientists isolated mitochondrial DNA from the dental calculus of the so-called dragon man, whose remains were found in Harbin. They supported their conclusions by analyzing ancient proteins preserved in the temporal bone of this individual.
