Oberkassel, Bonn

Oberkassel D999 and D998[2] (Ok1 and 2[3]) are a set of Mesolithic human skeletons discovered from 14,000 and 13,000 years[2][page needed] old deposits in a quarry.

Jelinek et al. (1969) grouped these crania with Cro-Magnon under the name Homo sapiens fossilis alongside Vestonice, Brno, and Predmosti.

[9] It was determined that the site was a place of burial and not storage, and that the hunters lived nearby in an overhang under the basalt wall.

[6] A dating given by Oxford in 1994 suggests an age of 12-11.35 ka,[11] a conclusion also reached by the LVR-Amt für Bodendenkmalpflege im Rheinland [de] (Rhenish Office for the Preservation of Archaeological Monuments) through soil samples.

They ate closely related seeds from northern Scandinavia during childhood, suggesting that it served as a refugium for hunters.

The woman had given birth at least once, and the man survived a fracture to the right ulna, and an injury to the left parietal that may have been an accident or a projectile, such as a slingshot.

[13] The skull of the woman is notable in having disintegrated sutures leading to mispositioning of the nasals and temporals as well as defects to the cranial base.

[17] Robert Bonnet initially attempted classification of the Oberkassel burial, finding resemblance to the Neanderthals in the skull of the man and resemblance to the Cro-Magnon humans through the narrow nose, sloped rectangular orbits, angled mandible, pronounced chin, and low, long face.

[6] Josef Szombathy (1920) first classified these hominins solely with Cro-Magnons, although recent research agrees that humans of this time were much more uniform than early racial classification suggests.

He found "typical" European morphology, characterizing the man as "averagely robust" and the woman as "hyper-feminine type".

[18][19] The two Oberkassel specimens (c. 14 kya) represent the earliest yet found evidence for Western Hunter-Gatherer ancestry (WHG).

Franz Heiderich discovered an "animal" or "horse" head after quarry workers noted a "hair arrow" (initially thought to be a hairpin).

[21] It is assumed to be an elk, similar to those of the Magdalenian found in France and England, and a probable part of the Federmesser culture; it was not wearable.

Some of the original fauna include domestic dogs, the brown bear, red deer, and aurochs/steppe bison (the bovines being too fragmentary to cement an identification).