Azykh Cave

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The Azykh Cave (alternatively known as Azikh or Azokh; Azeri: Azıx mağarası) is an impressive six-cave complex known as a living site of stone-age man. It lies about 3 km northeast of Tugh village in southern Karabakh, an area legally within the Fizuli district of Azerbaijan but now under de-facto self rule by the ethnic Armenian population of Nagorno-Karabakh since the war of the early 1990s.

Extensively examined by archaeologists in the 1960s, the cave is considered to be the site of one of the most ancient proto-human habitations in Eurasia. A Neanderthal-style jaw bone found here by Mammadali Huseynov in 1968^[1] but now kept at the Academy of Sciences in Baku is thought to be over 300,000 years old and thus one of the oldest proto-human remains found in this part of the world. Its discovery has given rise to the term Azykh Man.

Archaeologists suggest that the finds in the lowest layers of the cave are of a pre-Acheulean culture, one of the world's oldest (730,00-1,500,000 years)^[1] and in many ways similar to the Olduwan culture in Tanzania's Olduvai Gorge along with the culture which produced the famous Lascaux cave in southeastern France^[2].

[edit] References