Viola T. Dobosi: Paleolithic Man in the Által-ér Valley (Tata, 1999)

herbs with coloured flowers till the tall pines was not only, or not mainly, important for their aesthetical merits, much more for their utility for the people. We have no objective proofs on the utilisation of different vegetal parts but deducing from our current knowledge, many of the plants documented in the fossil record could serve as source of food like wild ancestors of plants cultivated today for their fruit: blackberry, apple, sloe, grape, walnut, olive; - and edible plants that were not domesticated or cultivated, but collected and consumed even today: hips (fruit of the wild rose), hazelnut, sorb; - as well as other edible plants which are typically not eaten Rg. 9. Lilac 28 today: pine-nuts, fruit of the cedar-tree or the Celtis, acorn. We can add that in the wet and warm environment probably a lot of edible mushrooms could grow, we can summarise that the vegetal sources of nutrition from early summer to late autumn (from blueberry till acorn and nuts) could be collected here and stored all over the year in suitable quantity, rich in nutrients and vitamins. Opposed to our expectations, no charcoal was found on the hearth-places. Following the happiness felt when evidences for the traces of the use of fire were found, a lot of experiments were made to reconstruct firing practices of the early men. The fire of probably natural origin must have been set or transferred to the camp with wood but the embers were preserved with fat bones broken to small pieces. The high ignition temperature of the bone burnt the wood to ashes. Whatever remained from the hearth-place of the early man is a heap of 30-40 cm diameter large radially arrayed bones burned black. In the cultural layer of the settlement (the area of former human activity where archaeologists find the accumulated remains, tools, fabrication debris, remains of bones and teeth in intact position) a large number of animal bones were found. Part of the species identified were rodents and small mammals, part of them belonged to large size herbivores or predators, representing different parts of the body. In the attached table, the species