Dmanisi essays

Dmanisi essays The site of Dmanisi (Eastern Georgia), is approximately 1.7 million years old and is located approximately eighty-five kilometers southwest of the Georgian capital of Tbilisi and twenty kilometers north of the countrys border with Armenia, located near the lower Caucasus Mountains. The environmental setting surrounding Dmanisi was relatively a mild Mediterranean climate. The presence of the Black Sea to the west and the Caspian Sea to the east ensures an environmental setting that provided hominids with extensive lithic resources that were used for tool production. This region also appears to have been ecologically diverse. It is rich in animal and plant resources, and it contains the remains of deer and horse animal bones. The location of the Dmanisi site would have attracted many hominids as well as many animals because of its proximity to the water. The key findings in this site include four hominid skulls, two-thousand stone tools and thousands of animal fossils. Dmanisi was an important city from early medieval times. It is located overlooking two rivers, surrounded by the gentle green hills of the southern Caucasus, where Europe meets Asia. The remains of this ancient Silk Road that stretched from Europe to China pass nearby. Merchant caravans laden with silk and spices once stopped here to water their animals and refresh themselves in the shadows of the medieval castle that once ruled the region. But beneath all of this lies the rock of an ancient volcanic eruption that spewed molten lava about 1.8 million years ago. It is here that researchers continue to uncover human fossil remains. In 1991, David Lordkipanidze, a leading geologist and paleontologist was leading the excavation of the Dmanisi site when his crew found a hominid bone underneath the skeleton of a saber-tooth cat. Before David Lordkipanidze excavated the site in 1991, a paleontologist by the name of Abesalom Vekua had been excavating the site since 1983....