The Neanderthal's bones were found in Ciemna Cave, which researchers have been excavating for decades. 
 
 One Neanderthal child had a very bad day about 115,000 years ago. The child died — that much is certain — and the bones were gulped down and digested by a giant, prehistoric bird, according to archaeologists in Poland. 
 
 However, it's unclear whether the giant bird killed the child before the gruesome feast or whether the child died from another cause before the bird scavenged the remains, the archaeologists said. 
 
 Either way, it appears that the child's phalanges (finger bones) passed "through the digestive system of a large bird," Paweł Valde-Nowak, a professor of archaeology at Jagiellonian University in Kraków, Poland, said in a statement. "This is the first such known example from the ice age." [In Photos: Bones from a Denisovan-Neanderthal Hybrid] 
 
 The discovery of the Neanderthal child's finger bones is a big finding, especially because the bones, discovered in Ciemna Cave, are the oldest known human remains ever to be found in Poland. 
 
 Until now, the oldest known human remains in Poland were three Neanderthal molars from Stajnia Cave that dated to between 52,000 and 42,000 years ago. Neanderthals (Homo neanderthalensis) lived in Eurasia from about 300,000 to about 35,000 years ago and are modern humans' closest extinct relatives. (The date for the extinction of Neanderthals is up in the air. According to a 2006 study in the journal Nature, Neanderthals may have lived to about 24,000 years ago, although these individuals were likely among the last of their kind.) 
 
 An analysis of the newly analyzed finger bones revealed that the child was likely between the age of 5 and 7 when he or she died, Valde-Nowak said. The 0.4-inch-long (1 centimeter) bones themselves are porous, and dotted with dozens of strainer-like holes, he added. 
 
 The tiny 0.4-inch-long (1 centimeter) neanderthal finger bones. Credit: Barbara Drobniewicz 
 
 But given their poor state of preservation, the bones are not suitable for DNA analysis, Valde-Nowak and his colleagues said. 
 
 "But we have no doubts that these are Neanderthal remains, because they come from a very deep layer of the cave, a few meters [yards] below the present surface," Valde-Nowak said. "This layer also contains typical stone tools used by the Neanderthal." 
 
 Moreover, it appears that the Neanderthals used the cave seasonally, he said. Researchers have been studying Ciemna Cave for decades, and while they found the child's bones (as well as a few ancient animal bones) there a few years ago, it wasn't until 2018 that a new analysis revealed that these bones belonged to a Neanderthal. 
 
 "This is a unique discovery," Valde-Nowak said. "Only single fragments of fossil bones belonging to relatives of modern man (Homo sapiens) have survived to our times in Poland." Researchers have also unearthed Neanderthal tools — such as knife scrapers, which could be used to cut and scrape — on the banks of Poland's Vistula River. All of these Neanderthal findings come from southern Poland, indicating that the region was advantageous for Neanderthals, unlike northern Poland, which was covered with a glacier during the last ice age. 
 
 The research, which is not yet published, is due out later this year in the Journal of Paleolithic Archaeology. 
 
 Originally published on Live Science. ||||| Scientists discover the oldest human remains in Poland; they are over 100,000 years old 
 
 The oldest human remains discovered in Poland are over 100,000 years old. They are hand bones of a Neanderthal child digested by a large bird. The remains were found in Cave Ciemna (Małopolska). 
 
 Until now, the oldest human remains from Poland, also of a Neanderthal, were the three molars from Cave Stajnia in the Kraków-Częstochowa Upland. Their age was estimated at approx. 52-42 thousand years. 
 
 "The bones our team discovered in Cave Ciemna are the oldest human remains from the area of today`s Poland, they are about 115,000 years old" - says Prof. Paweł Valde-Nowak from the Institute of Archeology of the Jagiellonian University in Kraków. 
 
 Excavations in Cave Ciemna are carried out as part of a National Science Centre grant, in cooperation with the Archaeological Museum in Kraków and the Institute of Systematics and Animal Evolution of the Polish Academy of Sciences. Information about the find will be published this year in the Journal of Paleolithic Archaeology. 
 
 Analysis shows that the bones are phalanges - digital bones of a Neanderthal child`s hand. This identification has been confirmed by two anthropologists, Dr. Anita Szczepanek from the Jagiellonian University in Kraków and Prof. Erik Trinkaus from Washington University in St. Louis. 
 
 Scientists noticed the characteristic, porous surface of the bones, dotted with dozens of holes, reminiscent of a strainer. 
 
 "Analyses show that this is the result of passing through the digestive system of a large bird. This is the first such known example from the Ice Age" - says Prof. Valde-Nowak. The scientist believes that the bird could attack and partially consume a young Neanderthal (probably around 5-7 years old). It could also feed on a deceased child. According to the researchers, neither option can be ruled out at this point. 
 
 The bones are no more than 1 cm long. They are very poorly preserved, so scientists will not be able to perform DNA analysis. "But we have no doubts that these are Neanderthal remains, because they come from a very deep layer of the cave, a few meters below the present surface. This layer also contains typical stone tools used by the Neanderthal" - adds Prof. Valde-Nowak. The scientist notes that this does not necessarily mean that the fingers ended up in the cave while the Neanderthals lived in it, because they could have used the cave seasonally. 
 
 The phalanges were discovered a few years ago (excavation research in Cave Ciemna has been going on for several decades). The remains were mixed up with animal bones. It was not until this year that researchers discovered that they were human bones during a detailed laboratory analysis. 
 
 "This is a unique discovery" - emphasises the scientist. - "Only single fragments of fossil bones belonging to relatives of modern man (Homo sapiens) have survived to our times in Poland". Professor Valde-Nowak also notes that in our country there are no remains of human species that precede the Neanderthal man, such as Homo erectus. 
 
 "We can count the Neanderthal remains found in Poland on the fingers of one hand!" - emphasizes Prof. Valde-Nowak. These are three teeth from Cave Stajnia, the two recently discovered fingers from Cave Ciemna and the tooth from the same period as the remains from Cave Stajnia, recently found tooth in Cave Ciemna - the archaeologist says. 
 
 Professor Valde-Nowak reminds that Neanderthals (Homo neanderthalensis) - very close relatives of modern man (Homo sapiens) - probably appeared in Poland, as in all of Europe, approx. 300,000 years ago. The oldest stone tools they used, discovered on the Vistula, are over 200,000 years old. So far, thousands of them have been discovered. These are mainly knives-scrapers, tools with a cutting and scraping function. They were discovered in southern Poland, because there were relatively good conditions for Neanderthal life in that area. The northern part of present Poland was covered by a continental glacier. 
 
 "There is still a discussion as to how long Neanderthals lived in Europe, including Poland. Unfortunately, we do not have strong arguments in this discussion, and we have no evidence that both species co-existed in Poland, which has been confirmed in Western Europe" - adds the archaeologist. 
 
 The Neanderthals on our continent mostly died out about 35,000 years ago. But in 2006, scientists published an article in "Nature", in which they argued that they were able to discover their 24 thousand years old remains - those were probably some of the last specimens of this species. 
 
 Scientists consider the Neanderthal a "brother", not an ancestor of contemporary man - it belonged to the extinct line of homo sapiens. For a long time, this species was presented in an unfavourable way - as being semi-animal and primitive. Research from recent years shows that this species of man had more in common with us than originally thought. Scientists are often unable to distinguish between the tools of modern men and those of Neanderthal men. Researchers also found that Neanderthals were the authors of some of the rock drawings known from European caves - namely those whose age is estimated at over 64,000 years. In turn, thanks to DNA research, it was possible to determine that homo sapiens was interbreeding with the Neanderthal. 
 
 PAP - Science in Poland, Szymon Zdziebłowski 
 
 szz/ zan/ kap/ 
 
 tr. RL ||||| Nick Poole/Liquid Jungle 
 
 A human skeleton that was stolen from an underwater cave in Mexico in 2012 may be one of the oldest ever found in the Americas. Scientists have now put the age of the skeleton at more than 13,000 years old after analysing a shard of hip bone — left behind by the thieves because it was embedded in a stalagmite. 
 
 Cave divers discovered the remains in February 2012 in a submerged cave called Chan Hol near Tulúm on Mexico's Yucatán peninsula, and posted photos of a nearly complete skull and other whole bones to social media. The posts caught the attention of archaeologists Arturo González González at the Desert Museum in Saltillo, Mexico, and Jerónimo Avilés Olguín at the Institute of American Prehistory in Cancún. 
 
 By the time researchers visited the cave in late March, the remains were gone — except for about 150 bone fragments and a pelvic bone that had been subsumed by a stalagmite growing up from the cave floor. On the basis of these bones, the researchers think that the skeleton belonged to a young man who died when sea levels were much lower and the cave was above ground. 
 
 Dating techniques 
 
 To determine the age of human remains, researchers often measure levels of a radioactive isotope of carbon in collagen protein within bones. But in this case, most of the collagen had been leached out by water while the bones were submerged, making this method unreliable, says Wolfgang Stinnesbeck, a palaeontologist and geoscientist at the University of Heidelberg, Germany, who led the efforts to date the remains. 
 
 Instead, Stinnesbeck’s team collected a fleck of the pelvis bone and surrounding stalagmite, which contains a mineral called calcite. The team then dated the rock using the relative levels of uranium and thorium isotopes in the calcite. The deeper into the stalagmite the researchers sampled, the older the dates turned out to be; stone just 2 centimetres from the bone was 11,300 years old. Calcite closer to the bone gave conflicting results, Stinnesbeck says. 
 
 The team determined that the skeleton was older than 13,000 years by analysing the rate at which calcite had formed around the bone, and by matching the shifts in stalagmite isotope levels to those in other caves. The findings were published on 30 August in PLoS ONE1. 
 
 Eugenio Acevez Nunez 
 
 Alistair Pike, an archaeological scientist at the University of Southampton, UK, notes that the stalagmite set over the bone during a time of profound climate change, which could have altered the stalagmite's rate of growth. He says he is therefore more comfortable considering the bones to be a minimum of 11,300 years old — still “very significant”, he notes. 
 
 Ancient company 
 
 Few other human remains from the Americas are older than 13,000 years. The skeleton of a teenage girl recovered from a different Yucatán cave was carbon-dated to more than 12,000 years old, and a skeleton found in another submerged cave near Tulúm was deemed to be around 13,500 years old, also using radiocarbon dating. 
 
 “They’ve done a really nice job determining the age of this thing,” says David Meltzer, an archaeologist at Southern Methodist University in Dallas, Texas. There is convincing archaeological proof that humans colonized the Americas before 14,000 years ago, but very old remains are precious. “These sites are rare as hen’s teeth,” Meltzer says. 
 
 Apart from the Yucatán finds, the next-oldest skeleton from the Americas is that of a 12,600-year-old boy found in Montana, whose sequenced genome places him on a lineage leading to present-day Native American groups. Researchers have sequenced only a few other human skeletons from the Americas that are older than 10,000 years, hindering efforts to unravel the region's ancient population history. 
 
 Wolfgang Stinnesbeck 
 
 Getting DNA from what remains of the Chan Hol skeleton will be hard. A sample sent to one of the world’s leading ancient-DNA labs, the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, did not contain enough DNA, Stinnesbeck says. He hopes to find DNA in the few teeth not taken by the thieves. 
 
 The theft still boggles Stinnesbeck, whose team is continuing to study the cave and its remains. The researchers recently reported the discovery of fossils in the cave that are of a new species of peccary2 — a hoofed mammal related to pigs — as well as evidence that the cave's human inhabitants made fires. 
 
 “What would you want with a skeleton? Would you take it home?” Stinnesbeck asks. “If they had known it was very old, maybe just to have a souvenir, to have something special.” 
 
 “We went to the police and they did some inquiries,” he adds. “They never came up with anything substantial.”
– Two tiny finger bones found in a cave in Poland tell a pretty grim story: Sometime about 115,000 years ago, a "large bird" ate a Neanderthal child, Live Science reports. According to CNN, scientists determined the fate of the child based on the bones' porous surface, which, per researcher Pawel Valde-Nowak, resulted from the bones "passing through the digestive system of a large bird." What isn't known is whether the bird killed and ate the child, thought to be 5 to 7 years old, or if the child was already dead and the bird was a scavenger. Either way, Valde-Nowak says in a statement, "This is the first known example from the Ice Age." Because of the poor condition of the bones, DNA analysis is not an option, according to reports. Nonetheless, the bones, discovered in Ciemna Cave, are an important find in Poland, as they are the oldest human remains unearthed in the country. Previously, the oldest human remains found in Poland were three Neanderthal molars dated to be about 52,000 years old. The finger bones, which measure just a centimeter in length, were found among animal bones a few years ago about 9 feet below the cave's current surface, per CNN. It wasn't until the bones were analyzed this year that researchers realized they were from a human. (Read how a bit of cave dirt has changed archaeology.)