Kostyonki is a village on the right bank of the
Don in the Khokholsky district of the Voronezh region. It is the
administrative center of Kostensky rural settlement. The ancient
Paleolithic sites of the ancient man, which are preserved by the
local museum-reserve "Kostenki", are world famous.
In 1642,
on the bank of the Don, the son of the boyar Bogdan Koninsky laid
the city of Kostensk. It was a wooden fortress with the wooden
church of the Intercession. In 1682, the cathedral church in the
name of John the Baptist was erected.
While in Voronezh at
the construction of the fleet in April 1696, Peter I heard that
giant bones were being found near Kostensk. After that, he was
sent to this city to collect information from the soldiers of the
Preobrazhensky regiment Philemon Katasonov. This year can be
considered the beginning of archaeological research in the Voronezh
region.
The most ancient building in Kostyonki is the village
government building and the mail buildingof the XIX century.
The Kostenkovsko-Borshchevo complex of Stone Age
sites are Paleolithic sites of ancient people discovered in the area
of the villages of Kostenki and Borshchevo in the Khokholsky
district of the Voronezh region. Monuments of the Aurignacian
culture are concentrated here on a very small territory: more than
60 sites of the ancient Stone Age - sites Kostenki-I-XXI,
Borshchevo-I-V (including 10 multilayer sites) occupy an area of
30 km². To study and preserve them, in 1991 the Kostenki branch of
the Voronezh Museum of Local Lore was transformed into the Kostenki
State Archaeological Museum-Reserve.
Excavation history
The discovery of antiquities in the Kostenok area is mentioned by SG
Gmelin in his Journey across Russia (1768), although the remains of
mammoths were found here earlier, as indicated by the name of the
settlement. The Dutchman de Bruin, who accompanied Peter I to the
south of Russia in 1703, writes, for example:
“In the area
where we were, to our great surprise, we found many elephant teeth,
of which I kept one for myself, for the sake of curiosity, but I
cannot understand how these teeth could get here. True, the emperor
told us that Alexander the Great, passing by this river, as some
historians assure, reached the small town of Kostenka, located eight
versts from here, and that it could very well be that at that very
time several elephants fell here, the remains of which are still
here today. "
The site "Kostenki-1" was discovered in 1879 by
the Russian archaeologist Ivan Polyakov. The purpose of the
excavations in 1881 and 1915 (largely unsystematic) was to find
stone tools. A systematic study of the Kostenkovo monuments began
in the 1920s.
The most significant works in Kostenki were
directed by P.P. Efimenko. In the 1930s, this scientist uncovered a
now conserved dwelling made of mammoth bones (dimensions 36 × 15
meters, age about 20 thousand years). On the territory of the
dwelling there are 12 pits, which were used as ossuary. Other
dwellings of the Kostenkovites are elongated; a number of foci are
located along the longitudinal axis.
By the second half of
the 20th century, it became clear that Kostenki did not represent a
single settlement, so in the scientific literature you can often
find a numeral after the name of the site, the most famous of which
are Kostenki-12 and Kostenki-14 (Markina Gora).
"Kostenki-1"
(Polyakov's site) have much in common with the upper layer of the
Avdeevskaya site in the Kursk region. Kostenki 1/1, Kostenki 4 / II
(Aleksandrovskaya site), Kostenki 8/2, Kostenki 21/3 belong together
with the sites Pushkari 1, Borshchevo 1, Buran-Kaya, Khotylevo 2,
Gagarino, Zaraysk, Willendorf, Dolni-Vestonice, Předmosti, Pavlov,
Avdeevo, Petrzkovice and Berdyzh to the Eastern Gravettian culture.
Kostenki 2, Kostenki 3, Kostenki 11-Ia and Kostenki 19 are combined
into the Zamyatninsk culture. Kostenki 1 layer 2, Kostenki 1 layer
3, Kostenki 6 (Streletskaya), Kostenki 11 (Anosovka 2), Kostenki 12
layer 3 belong to the sites of the seletoid circle. The Telman
culture is named after the monument to Kostenki VIII (2nd layer)
(Telman site).
In the upper layer of the Upper Paleolithic
site of Kostenki 1 (complex No. 2), characterized by the industry of
the Gravetian culture (22-24 thousand years ago), ND Praslov found
the sixth left rib of a mammoth with the pointed part of a flint tip
stuck in it. At the Kostenki 14 site in a layer lying below the
"horizon in volcanic ash" associated with the eruption of one of the
volcanic systems in the Gulf of Naples about 40 thousand years BC.
BC, a fragment of the second left rib of a mammoth was found with a
tip made from mammoth ivory embedded in it.
The Kostenkov
archaeological expedition is working on the sites: Kostenki 14
(Markina Gora), Kostenki 6 (Streletskaya), Kostenki 15
(Gorodtsovskaya), Kostenki 16 (Uglyanka), Kostenki 17
(Spitsinskaya), Kostenki 21 (Gmelynskaya). At the Kostenki 17 site,
drilled pendants were found made of arctic fox tusks, stone pebbles
and belemnites using biconical drilling technology (pendants were
drilled from both sides). The specific technical and typological
characteristics of the flint inventory of Kostenok 17 of cultural
layer II served as the basis for the identification of the Spitsyn
archaeological culture.
Material culture
At the first surveyed site
(Kostenki-1), ten “Kostenkovskaya venuses” were found: stone or bone
figures of naked women with enlarged abdomen, breasts, and hips.
Finds such as, for example, pieces of dyes are also unique,
suggesting that the Kostenkovites used charcoal and marly rocks to
obtain black and white paints, and the ferruginous nodules found in
nature, after processing them in a fire, gave dark red and ocher
tones. dyes. Burnt clay was also found there - perhaps it was used
to coat baking pits. The sites consisted of huts, the bases of which
were mammoth bones. There are two types of dwellings. The structures
of the first type are large, elongated, with hearths located along
the longitudinal axis, like the ground dwelling, 36 meters long and
15 meters wide, uncovered in the 1930s by Peter Efimenko, with four
dugouts, 12 storage pits, various depressions and pits that were
used as storage. The dwellings of the second type were round, with a
hearth located in the center. Earthen embankments, mammoth bones,
wood and animal skins were used for construction.
The whole
skeletons of wolves and arctic foxes found indicate that ancient
hunters removed the skins and fur of animals to make clothes. This
is also confirmed by bone tools for processing hides and making
softened leather: burnished, plows, awls and all sorts of points,
items for smoothing the seams of clothing. The tendons of animals
were used as threads.
- Svetlana Demeschenko, State Hermitage
In addition to mammoths, wolves and polar foxes, bones of hares,
gophers, marmots, beavers, mole rats, hamsters, steppe and yellow
pied, water rat, mole vole, common vole, root vole, large jerboa,
canids, corsac, foxes, bears were found in Kostenki , wolverines,
cave lions, horses, Pleistocene donkey, woolly rhinoceros, wild
boar, red deer, northern and giant deer, elk, roe deer, bison, bull,
saiga, birds, fish and shellfish.
There were also found the
remains of household objects, tools, jewelry typical of the late
Paleolithic: headbands, bracelets, figured pendants, miniature (up
to 1 centimeter) stripes for hats and clothes, fragments of small
plastic, seashells from the Black Sea coast.
Human remains
In the 1950s, four Upper Paleolithic burials were discovered in
Kostenki during three field seasons. In 1983, another find was made.
Thus, scientists judge the population of the Middle Don by finds
from five burials: a young man from Kostenok-14, an elderly man from
Kostenok-2 (Zamyatnin site), two children from Kostenok-15
(Gorodtsovskaya site) and Kostenok-18, a newborn boy from
Kostenok-12. The burials of Kostenka-2 and Kostenka-15 belong to the
Kostenkovo-Gorodtsy culture, the burial of Kostenka-18 (21020 ± 180
years ago) belongs to the Kostenkovo-Avdeevka culture. The burial of
Kostenka-14 from Markina Gora belongs to an unknown cultural
tradition. In Kostenki-2, the corpse was in a sitting position and a
whole house was built for him.
Human remains from the
Kostenki-14 site (37,000 years ago) were reconstructed by M.M.
Gerasimov, who personally participated in the excavations. In terms
of anthropological indicators, it resembles modern Papuans. He was
distinguished by his short stature (160 cm), narrow face, wide nose,
prognathism. However, later the population of the site has a
Cro-Magnoid appearance.
The skeleton from Markina Gora
(Kostenki 14), dated to 37 thousand years old, was examined for
mitochondrial and Y-chromosomal DNA. He was found to have the
mitochondrial haplogroup U2 (now this haplogroup is distributed
mainly in Northern India and the Kama region) and the Y-chromosomal
haplogroup C1b-F1370 *, characteristic of South and Southeast Asia,
Australia and New Guinea. In the Kostenka 12 sample, dated 32
thousand years old, the C1-F3393 * branch of the Y-chromosomal
haplogroup C and the mitochondrial haplogroup U2 were identified.
V.P. Yakimov discovered the similarity of metric data and the
outlines of the cerebral section of the skull of Kostenka-15 with
the skull of Předmosti II from Moravia. For the skull of Kostenka-2,
GF Debets noted a disharmonious combination of a long skull and a
wide face. Long bones have hardly been studied until now, since they
have not been extracted from the monolith. The poorly preserved
children's skull of Kostenka-18 has archaic features. The
postcranial skeleton (parts of the skeleton, except for the skull)
of a newborn boy from the burial at the Kostenki-12 site, discovered
by M.V. Anikovich in 1983, differed from the skeletons of modern
newborns by a significantly higher value of the elbow-shoulder
index.
G.F.Debets believed that the skulls from Kostenki
belonged to three races - Cro-Magnon proper (Kostenki-2 and
Kostenki-18), Brno-Předmost (Kostenki-15) and Grimaldian
(Kostenki-14) and that these findings reflect participation in the
formation of the Upper Paleolithic population of the Russian Plain
of ancient forms of modern races. VV Bunak considered the skull of
Kostenka-14 and the skull of the "Negroids" of Grimaldi to be
sharply deviating forms.
The small volume of the cerebral
capsule of the skull from Kostenok-14 indicates the foreignness of
this find among other Upper Paleolithic neoanthropes. The features
of the physique of a person from Kostenok-14 are directly opposite
to the features of a person from Sungir, which is distinguished by
brachymorphism, large growth, a large conditional indicator of
volume and a high ratio of body weight to its surface. Perhaps the
discovery of a man on Markina Gora is evidence of the early
penetration of a representative of a population into the Russian
Plain that was not adapted to life even in the warm conditions of
the interglacial.
At the Tel'manskaya site (Kostenki 8),
perhaps the earliest case of symbolic craniotomy was revealed.
New dating
The estimated age of the fossil remains dates back
to the period when the periglacial tundra prevailed in these parts.
Until recently, it was believed that the lower layers date back 32
thousand years before our time. Paleomagnetic and radiocarbon
studies of volcanic ash found in these layers suggest that it was
brought in after a catastrophic eruption in the Phlegrean fields
39,600 years ago. Thus, the age of the oldest layer of the site may
be 40–42 thousand years. The approximate time of the appearance in
Europe of modern man (Cro-Magnon) is 45 thousand years ago.
According to the data of paleomagnetic analysis at Kostenki-12, a
paleomagnetic excursion from Lashamp-Kargapolovo is recorded in the
deposits located directly under the ash, the age of which ranges
from 38 to 45 thousand years ago. At the Kostenki-12 site, there is
a date 52-50 thousand years ago for the upper part of the underlying
cultural layer V strata of gray-pale yellow loam.
The
archaeological site of Kostenki-12 contains the oldest known
cultural layers of the region (layer Ve of the Paleolithic, layer
IVe of the Upper Paleolithic, layer IIIe of the
Kostenkovo-Streletskaya culture of the early phase), dating from the
early part of the marine isotope stage MIS 3 or, in chronometric
terms, 54–42 ka BP. years ago. New data from Kostenka-12 show that
the East European Upper Paleolithic began ~ 45 thousand years ago.
The stratigraphy is similar to the Borshchevo-5 stratigraphy. The
lowermost Paleolithic layer V and paleosoil D, characterized by the
dominance of elm, correlate with the second half of the optimum of
the Glinde interstadial, which was 51–48 thousand years ago. The
earliest Upper Paleolithic layers IV and paleosoil B, characterized
by the coexistence of elm forests and bogs, began to form in the
second half of the optimum of the Moershoofd interstadial, which
fell at 46–44 thousand years ago. ... BC, correlating with DO 12.
Paleosoil A and layer III (Kostenko-Streletskaya culture) began to
form after a sharp decline in the Moershufd interstadial ~ 43.5
thousand years. BC, in unstable conditions (steppe with a
predominance of horses and late spruce forest-tundra with a
predominance of deer). Infrared Stimulated Luminescence (IRSL) /
Optically Stimulated Luminescence (OSL) dates for sedimentary
deposits immediately below layer V of sample UIC-917 (50.52 ± 4.38,
51.33 ± 4.95 and 52.44 ± 3.85 thousand BP) coincide with the age of
the interstadial of the Glinde-paleosol D and sedimentary deposits
immediately below it, while the age of sample UIC-945 (44.15 ± 0.78,
44.65 ± 3.8, 45.2 ± 3 , 26 thousand years ago) corresponds to the
Moershufd interstadial.