Common name The Rhünda Skull Age 12000 ± 80 years BP Discovered by Eitel Glatzer | Species homo sapiens sapiens Date discovered 19 July 1956 | |
Place discovered Rhünda in North Hesse, Germany | ||
The Rhünda Skull is a fossil hominid skull that was found just outside the village of Rhünda in North Hesse, Germany.
Contents
Discovery
On the night of 19 July 1956 there was a heavy storm in North Hessen. This caused the stream northwest of Rhünda, the Rhündabach, to strongly erode the field that is now the Rhünda sports ground. On the morning of 20 July, a villager found parts of a hominid skull in the newly-eroded stream bed, about 80 centimetres (31 in) below the ground surface. The skull pieces were covered in calcareous sinter and surrounded by lime-rich tuff, loess, and basalt fragments.
History of Research
The find was passed on to Prof. Dr. Eduard Jacobshagen in the Department of Anatomy and Anthropology at the University of Marburg. On 26 August 1956, Prof. Jacobshagen present his research at the international congress 'Hundert Jahre Neanderthaler: 1856–1956 [a century of Neanderthals]' in Düsseldorf. From his reconstruction of the skull, he postulated it belonged to the species Homo neanderthalensis, i.e. a Neanderthal. This would mean the fossil was 30.000 years old. Furthermore, he thought the bones belonged to a female.
Heberer and Kurth from Göttingen University reconstructed the skull again and carried out fluorine and 14carbon dating on the surrounding material. They suggested the skull belong to a 'modern' homo sapiens sapiens. Together with the 14carbon age of the calcareous sinter that surrounded the skull at 8365 ± 100 BP, the owner of the skull was thus firmly believed to have lived in the late to early Preboreal. This correlates to the Mesolithic period.
In 2002 Wilfried Rosendahl carried out the first direct age dating of the skull with the accelerator mass spectrometry 14carbon method. He dated the fossil at 12000 ± 80 years BP, which means the human lived in the Upper Paleolithic. This was the period of the retreat of the Last glacial period in Europe. The skull is now thought to have belonged to a man.
The skull now resides in the Museum of Hessian History in Kassel.