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

cave in the Gerecse Mountains. The climate was getting gradually more severe, dry, and in the forests pine-trees became dominant. These changes were not sensible to the individual persons, becoming apparent only after generations. The constant deterioration of the climate pointing towards one direction lead to the first cold maximum of the Wurm period. Probably, during the cold-continental, subarctic climate period, the Szelim-cave offered shelter to these hunters. The hunted game differed essentially from the fauna of the younger layers. The Upper Palaeolithic hunters were chasing animals that populate, though under different ecological conditions, significant areas even today like the reindeer or caribou, and even if they are getting extinct this is not the result of the changes in climate but that of the „blessed" activity of man (e.g., wild horse). The hunters of the Middle Palaeolithic Jankovichian culture were fighting against animals which became extinct several thousand years ago. The dominant species of the period around the cave were cave bear and woolly rhinoceros. The latter one could only get into the fauna of the cave as a booty, but the cave bear, being naturally a cave-dweller himself, could also belong to animals arriving to a natural death in this cave. Scraping away the soil of the cave further on, under the yellow loessy layer housing two basically different Palaeolithic cultures, a brown layer of uneven but considerable thickness was found. Its thickness surpassed, at certain points, 4 metres. The accumulation of this layer could take a long time. From the archaeological point of view, however, it was very poor, only some fragments documenting human habitation were found by István Gaál. On the other hand, however, the fauna was exceptionally rich. This is how the excavator commented about i.: „In respect of fossils, probably this is the most outstanding layer of the Szelim-cave. While parts of the cave loess were practically void of fossils, in this brown clay we could find at: unusually rich assemblages of animal bones here. The long bones were split here as well, which is undoubtedly the sign of human hands. And whereas the most frequent species here was cave bear, cave hyena follows in not much smaller quantities. This latter mammalian species occurred, apart from this layer, only in layer B and in very small quantities, we find that hyena is specially characteristic for the formation conditions of layer C, thus i he shall refer to this layer in the fallowings as „layer with Hyenas". As it was mentioned above, in the layer with Hyenas a large number of animal fossils were found. Cave bear undoubtedly dominates the fauna. At two places in a sack-like depression carved by the inhabitants of the Szelim-cave into the grey sandy bottom of the contemporary cave, almost all bones of one animal were found in one heap, at both pits. 44