Salzofen cave is an archaeological site in Styria,

Austria Austria, , bar, Östareich officially the Republic of Austria, is a country in the southern part of Central Europe, lying in the Eastern Alps. It is a federation of nine states, one of which is the capital, Vienna, the most populous ...

. It is located in the municipality of

Grundlsee Grundlsee is a municipality in the Liezen District of Styria, Austria. The municipality includes 151.54 km ² large parts of the Ausseerland and the Dead Mountains. The village is located directly on Grundlsee lake. Contents Geography ...

at an altitude of approximately , about sixty meters below the summit. It is known for its

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 ...

and Middle Paleolithic finds of fireplaces,

stone tools A stone tool is, in the most general sense, any tool made either partially or entirely out of stone. Although stone tool-dependent societies and cultures still exist today, most stone tools are associated with prehistoric (particularly Stone Ag ...

, and bone tools, the latter dating from 65000 to 31000

BCE Common Era (CE) and Before the Common Era (BCE) are year notations for the Gregorian calendar (and its predecessor, the Julian calendar), the world's most widely used calendar era. Common Era and Before the Common Era are alternatives to the or ...

Overview

In 1924 two hunters, who had taken shelter in the cave from a storm found several

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 ...

ized bones in the entrance area. They handed them over to Otto Körber, a local school principal from

Bad Aussee Bad Aussee (Central Bavarian: ''Bod Ossee'') is a town in the Austrian state of Styria, located at the confluence of the three sources of the Traun River in the Ausseerland region. Bad Aussee serves as the economic and cultural center of the Styr ...

. Körber visited the site on the next day and immediately began to dig, progressing almost until summer, unearthing large amounts of bone fossils. He soon realized, that most of the

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 ...

l remains are to be attributed to an interglacial period. The vast majority of the bones belonged to cave bears and Körber was able to reconstruct an entire cave skeleton from his findings. In deeper and older layers, he discovered bone fossils of wolf, marten, Alpine ibex and a complete

wolverine The wolverine (), (''Gulo gulo''; ''Gulo'' is Latin for " glutton"), also referred to as the glutton, carcajou, or quickhatch (from East Cree, ''kwiihkwahaacheew''), is the largest land-dwelling species of the family Mustelidae. It is a muscul ...

skeleton. In 1934 Körber found the first and for him only object made by prehistoric humans, a scraper made of horn although numerous charcoal fragments and burnt bones lead him to conclude, that he had found one of the most elevated occupation sites of Paleo-humans in Europe. During 1939, 1948 to 1953 and 1956 to 1964 excavations took place under the leadership of Kurt Ehrenberg. He found assemblages of tools and objects and suspiciously arrangements of bear skulls, that could only be attributed to human activity.

References

External links

The Culture Information System of the Austrian Ministry of Education, Science and Culture
* Höhlenlöwen, Raubkatzen im Eiszeitalter (2009), publisher: GRIN Verlag, München, page:197 {{Authority control Caves of Austria Landforms of Styria Archaeological sites in Austria