Darra-e Kūr or Bābā Darwīsh, is an

archaeological site An archaeological site is a place (or group of physical sites) in which evidence of past activity is preserved (either prehistoric or historic or contemporary), and which has been, or may be, investigated using the discipline of archaeology a ...

Badakhshan province Badakhshan Province (Persian/ Uzbek: , ''Badaxšān'') is one of the 34 provinces of Afghanistan, located in the northeastern part of the country. It is bordered by Tajikistan's Gorno-Badakhshan in the north and the Pakistani regions of Lower ...

Afghanistan Afghanistan, officially the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan,; prs, امارت اسلامی افغانستان is a landlocked country located at the crossroads of Central Asia and South Asia. Referred to as the Heart of Asia, it is bordere ...

. It is situated just northeast of Kalafgān near the village of Chinār-i Gunjus Khān east of

Taloqan Taloqan ( Persian, also transcribed Taleqan or Taluqan) is the capital of Takhar Province, in northeastern Afghanistan. It is located in the Taluqan District. The population was estimated as 196,400 in 2006. In 2021, the Taliban gained contro ...

, on the road to

Faizabad Faizabad (Hindustani pronunciation: ɛːzaːbaːd is a city situated near the southern banks of Saryu river in Ayodhya district in the Indian state of Uttar Pradesh. The area of this Faizabad region is administered by Ayodhya Municipal Corpo ...

. The cave is situated atop the side of the valley near the hamlet of ''Bābā Darwīsh''.

Description

Darra-e Kūr is a rock shelter, well-stratified in

silt Silt is granular material of a size between sand and clay and composed mostly of broken grains of quartz. Silt may occur as a soil (often mixed with sand or clay) or as sediment mixed in suspension with water. Silt usually has a floury feel ...

deposits, laid down by a stream. Approximately 800 stone implements were recovered, of two basic types:

flint Flint, occasionally flintstone, is a sedimentary cryptocrystalline form of the mineral quartz, categorized as the variety of chert that occurs in chalk or marly limestone. Flint was widely used historically to make stone tools and sta ...

and sickle blades, and large diabase points. Other finds included celts, scrapers, pounders, blades, simple jewelry,

fauna Fauna is all of the animal life present in a particular region or time. The corresponding term for plants is ''flora'', and for fungi, it is ''funga''. Flora, fauna, funga and other forms of life are collectively referred to as ''Biota (ecology ...

, such as fish, rodents, wild horse, domesticated sheep and goat and

onager The onager (; ''Equus hemionus'' ), A new species called the kiang (''E. kiang''), a Tibetan relative, was previously considered to be a subspecies of the onager as ''E. hemionus kiang'', but recent molecular studies indicate it to be a distinct ...

, a fragment of a human right

temporal bone The temporal bones are situated at the sides and base of the skull, and lateral to the temporal lobes of the cerebral cortex. The temporal bones are overlaid by the sides of the head known as the temples, and house the structures of the ears. ...

, many bone

fossil A fossil (from Classical Latin , ) is any preserved remains, impression, or trace of any once-living thing from a past geological age. Examples include bones, shells, exoskeletons, stone imprints of animals or microbes, objects preserved ...

s and three fragments of

tin Tin is a chemical element with the symbol Sn (from la, stannum) and atomic number 50. Tin is a silvery-coloured metal. Tin is soft enough to be cut with little force and a bar of tin can be bent by hand with little effort. When bent, t ...

and bronze. Unearthed pottery was mostly crude, black wares, sometimes decorated. The only architectural traces found were 80 post-holes, suggestive of tents. Three articulated goat burials were discovered. Collection: *

AMNH The American Museum of Natural History (abbreviated as AMNH) is a natural history museum on the Upper West Side of Manhattan in New York City. In Theodore Roosevelt Park, across the street from Central Park, the museum complex comprises 26 i ...

and

Kabul Museum The National Museum of Afghanistan (Dari: موزیم ملی افغانستان, ''Mūzīyam-e mellī-ye Afghānestān''; ps, د افغانستان ملی موزیم, ''Də Afghānistān Millī Mūzīyəm''), also known as the Kabul Museum, is a ...

- excavated material. Field-work: * 1966 Louis Dupree, AMNH - excavations.

Dating

The

Mousterian The Mousterian (or Mode III) is an archaeological industry of stone tools, associated primarily with the Neanderthals in Europe, and to the earliest anatomically modern humans in North Africa and West Asia. The Mousterian largely defines the l ...

artefacts come from a layer that was dated to around 30,000 BP. One of the younger layers above, referred to by the site archaeologists as coming from a "Goat Cult"

Neolithic The Neolithic period, or New Stone Age, is an Old World archaeological period and the final division of the Stone Age. It saw the Neolithic Revolution, a wide-ranging set of developments that appear to have arisen independently in several p ...

layer, was dated to around 3780 BP. Direct AMS dating of the temporal bone (NMNH 387961) reveals that the bone is a lot younger than previously thought, giving an age range of around 4530-4410 BP. Previously thought to have been from the Paleolithic, due to the presence of the bone among the layer containing Mousterian Levallois artefacts, direct dating has revealed that the bone is actually from the Neolithic. Researchers now believe that the temporal bone came from a later burial that intruded into the Mousterian layer, likely coming from the culture associated with the "Goat Cult" Neolithic layer.

Archaeogenetics

In 2017, researchers successfully extracted the DNA from both the petrous and squamous part of the Darra-e Kur temporal bone. The Darra-e Kur specimen is the first ancient human remain from Afghanistan from which DNA has been successfully sequenced. The individual was found to belong to Haplogroup H2a.

References

Citations

Bibliography