Šipka is a

cave Caves or caverns are natural voids under the Earth's Planetary surface, surface. Caves often form by the weathering of rock and often extend deep underground. Exogene caves are smaller openings that extend a relatively short distance undergrou ...

located near

Štramberk Štramberk (; ) is a town in Nový Jičín District in the Moravian-Silesian Region of the Czech Republic. It has about 3,500 inhabitants. It is known for the production of Štramberk ears. The historic centre of Štramberk is well preserved and ...

Moravian-Silesian Region The Moravian-Silesian Region () is one of the 14 administrative regions of the Czech Republic. Before May 2001, it was called the Ostrava Region (). The region is located in the north-eastern part of its historical region of Moravia and in most ...

Czech Republic The Czech Republic, also known as Czechia, and historically known as Bohemia, is a landlocked country in Central Europe. The country is bordered by Austria to the south, Germany to the west, Poland to the northeast, and Slovakia to the south ...

, 440 m

above sea level Height above mean sea level is a measure of a location's vertical distance (height, elevation or altitude) in reference to a vertical datum based on a historic mean sea level. In geodesy, it is formalized as orthometric height. The zero level ...

. In 1880, a

mandible In jawed vertebrates, the mandible (from the Latin ''mandibula'', 'for chewing'), lower jaw, or jawbone is a bone that makes up the lowerand typically more mobilecomponent of the mouth (the upper jaw being known as the maxilla). The jawbone i ...

of a

Neanderthal Neanderthals ( ; ''Homo neanderthalensis'' or sometimes ''H. sapiens neanderthalensis'') are an extinction, extinct group of archaic humans who inhabited Europe and Western and Central Asia during the Middle Pleistocene, Middle to Late Plei ...

child was found there. The age of the child has been estimated to be between 9 and 10 years.Jiří Svoboda, Vojen Ložek, Emanuel Vlček, "Hunters between East and West: the Paleolithic of Moravia", 1996, , pp.52-5
(Google books)
/ref> The archeological work in Šipka was conducted from 1879 to 1893 by Karel Jaroslav Maška. The cave was probably alternatively inhabited by Neandertals and

cave bear The cave bear (''Ursus spelaeus'') is a prehistoric species of bear that lived in Europe and Asia during the Pleistocene and became extinct about 24,000 years ago during the Last Glacial Maximum. Both the word ''cave'' and the scientific name '' ...

s. The site also yielded

Mousterian The Mousterian (or Mode III) is an Industry (archaeology), archaeological industry of Lithic technology, stone tools, associated primarily with the Neanderthals in Europe, and with the earliest anatomically modern humans in North Africa and We ...

tools and traces of

hearth A hearth () is the place in a home where a fire is or was traditionally kept for home heating and for cooking, usually constituted by a horizontal hearthstone and often enclosed to varying degrees by any combination of reredos (a low, partial ...

s. This was the first discovery of Neanderthal remains in their cultural context.

References

External links

*
Archeolog.cz: Description, site map, photo gallery and literature
(in

Czech Czech may refer to: * Anything from or related to the Czech Republic, a country in Europe ** Czech language ** Czechs, the people of the area ** Czech culture ** Czech cuisine * One of three mythical brothers, Lech, Czech, and Rus *Czech (surnam ...

). {{DEFAULTSORT:Sipka 1879 archaeological discoveries Caves of the Czech Republic Prehistoric sites in the Czech Republic Neanderthal sites Moravian Wallachia Nový Jičín District Mousterian