Zlatý kůň Cave

I came across this cave when I travelled through the Czech Republic and I got a tip from a friend to visit this place. Little did I know its importance in human history.

Zlatý kůň means Golden Horse in czech. It is located about 40 minutes drive southwest of Prague. The cave is located in a nature reserve in area with karst formations made from limestone.

The cave can only be accessed with a tour guide. Luckily enough the tour is quite cheap and well worth the small fee.

The cave is a natural formation but it has long been used by humans for different purposes. Between 1460-70 a group of criminals used the cave and had an entire minting operation faking Hussite coins there. They used copper instead of silver and coated the copper with a thin layer of silver.

Some claim that the name of the cave Zlatý kůň (Golden Horse) comes from a group of Celtic druids that were active there worshipping horses. If this is true or not I can’t verify.

In 1950 the cave was rediscovered when blasting work took place in a nearby quarry. Inside the cave a scull of a woman was found among with other bones of wholly rhino, mastodon, saber tooth tiger, cave lion, beaver, monkey, hyena, reindeer, deer, horse, wolf and cave bear.

This collection of animals bones are quite ancient, some of them are between 200,000 to 300,000 years old. Many of the species found are since then went extinct.

The woman’s scull was however not as old as the other bones. But she is still very old and she lived 45000 years ago. She is nowadays known as the Zlatý kůň woman.

Her people were new arrivals here and she was among the first modern humans in Europe. A continent that experienced the ice age and that she shared with the Neanderthals.

From the bones it was obvious that she was a woman with quite robust facial features. She was at first thought to be a man. Her scull was damaged and an animal had gnawed on it, most likely a wolf or a hyena.

This fact and the fact that the part of the cave system that she was found in showed no signs of human habitation most likely means that she didn’t live there or were buried there by here people. It is however possible that she died of an accident or that the animals killed her. Her body was then dragged into the cave by them. Her bones then fell down through a chimney like structure and ended up in the chamber where she was found.

Her scull was for a long time almost forgotten by the scientists. But eventually the interest rose and several attempts were made to radiocarbon test the remains to decide when she lived.

Whit the advances in DNA research a research team decided to try and sequence her DNA. Not a simple task with such ancient remains. They finally succeeded with the task and she is now the oldest modern human individual in the world that have been genetically sequenced.

One amazing discovery was that she had 3% Neanderthal DNA. Her ancestors had once lived in the middle east where some interbreeding took place between modern humans and Neanderthals. This happened 70-80 generations before her birth. So she had a lot more Neanderthal DNA than modern Europeans have today. Her heritage might be a plausible explanation to her robust facial features.

Recently Cícero Moraes created a 3D reconstruction of her face revealing how she looked.