[1]Anthropologists have uncovered the remains of a cave sleeping chamber complete with a hearth and grass beds which is believed to be used by Neanderthals anywhere between 53,000 and 39,000 years ago.
The cosy room, found inside the Esquilleu Cave in Cantabria, Spain, has evidence that the prehistoric humans were living the ultimate clean and literally green lifestyle, the scientists said.
They believe that Neanderthals were constructing new beds out of grass every so often and using the old bedding material to help fuel the hearth.
“It is possible that the Neanderthals renewed the bedding each time they visited the cave,” lead author Dan Cabanes, a researcher at the Weizmann Institute of Science’s Kimmel Centre for Archaeological Research, told Discovery News.
According to Cabanes, those hearth-side beds that might have been covered with animal furs also likely served as sitting areas during waking hours for the Neanderthals.
“In some way, they were used to make the area near the hearths more comfortable,” he said, mentioning that artifacts collected from various other Neanderthal sites suggest the inhabitants prepared stone tools, cooked, ate and snoozed near warming fires.
For this study, Cabanes and his team collected sediment samples from the Spanish cave. Detailed analysis of the samples allowed the scientists to reconstruct what materials were once present in certain parts of the cave at particular times.
The bedding material was identified based on the presence and arrangement of multiple phytoliths from grasses near the hearth area. Phytoliths are tiny fossilised particles formed of mineral matter by a once-living plant. —PTI
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