Areni-1 Cave

The Thread to the Needle: How our Ancestors Used the Native Flora DNA from sediments offers insights into the use of plants by humans in the Paleolithic Age

14.10.2022

Under the aegis of the University of Oslo, an international research team has extracted and analyzed plant DNA from the sediments of the Armenian “Aghitu-3” cave. About 40,000 to 25,000 years ago, the cave was used as a shelter by humans of the Upper Paleolithic. A detailed analysis of the DNA shows that the cave’s inhabitants may have used numerous plant species for a variety of purposes, including for medicine, dye, or yarn. The excavations were led by the National Academy of Sciences of Armenia and the research project “The Role of Culture in Early Expansions of Humans (ROCEEH),” which is based at the University of Tübingen and the Senckenberg Research Institute and Natural History Museum in Frankfurt. The study was recently published in the “Journal of Human Evolution.”