The find was passed on to Prof. Dr. Eduard Jacobshagen in the Department of
Anatomy and
Anthropology at the
University of Marburg. On 26 August 1956, Prof. Jacobshagen present his research at the international congress 'Hundert Jahre Neanderthaler: 1856–1956 [a century of Neanderthals]' in
Düsseldorf. From his reconstruction of the
skull, he postulated it belonged to the
species Homo neanderthalensis, i.e. a
Neanderthal. This would mean the
fossil was 30.000 years old. Furthermore, he thought the bones belonged to a female. Heberer and Kurth from
Göttingen University reconstructed the skull again and carried out
fluorine and
14carbon dating on the surrounding material. They suggested the skull belong to a 'modern'
homo sapiens sapiens. Together with the 14carbon age of the
calcareous sinter that surrounded the skull at 8,365 ± 100
BP, the owner of the skull was thus firmly believed to have lived in the late to early
Preboreal. This correlates to the
Mesolithic period. In 2002
Wilfried Rosendahl sent 2 g of the skull to the Centre for Isotope Research () at the
University of Groningen. Using the
accelerator mass spectrometry 14carbon method, they dated the sample at 10,000±80 years
BP. After calibration (with INTCAL 98), this gave an age of 10,015–9,747
BP, which correlates to the
Magdalenian-
Azilian period, at the beginning of the
European Mesolithic. They also showed that the skull belonged to a man. The skull resides in the Museum of Hessian History in
Kassel; there is a copy in the museum in Gensungen, close to
Felsberg. ==References==