Azykh Cave

The Azykh Cave (alternatively known as Azikh or Azokh; Azeri: "Azıx mağarası") is an impressive six-cave complex known as a living site of stone-age man. It lies about 3 km northeast of Tugh village in southern Karabakh, an area legally within the Fizuli district of Azerbaijan but now under de-facto self rule by the ethnic Armenian population of Nagorno-Karabakh since the war of the early 1990s.

Extensively examined by archaeologists in the 1960s, the cave is considered to be the site of one of the most ancient proto-human habitations in Eurasia. A Neanderthal-style jaw bone found here by Mammadali Huseynov in 1968 [http://www.azer.com/aiweb/categories/magazine/42_folder/42_articles/42_azikhcave.html Azerbaijan's Prehistoric Azikh Cave] by Dr. Arif Mustafayev] but now kept at the Academy of Sciences in Baku is thought to be over 300,000 years old and thus one of the oldest proto-human remains found in this part of the world. Its discovery has given rise to the term "Azykh Man".

Archaeologists suggest that the finds in the lowest layers of the cave are of a pre-Acheulean culture, one of the world's oldest (730,00-1,500,000 years) and in many ways similar to the Olduwan culture in Tanzania's Olduvai Gorge along with the culture which produced the famous Lascaux cave in southeastern France [ [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Azerbaijan] ] .

Excavations resumed in the mid 1990s. In 2002 an international research team headed by Tanya King discovered undisturbed entrances to the cave as well as fauna and stone tools [ [http://antiquity.ac.uk/ProjGall/King/king.html Exploration and Survey of Pleistocene Hominid Sites in Armenia and Karabagh] ] . The cave is now considered to have housed some of the earliest habitats of proto-humans in Eurasia. While little in the way of human remains have been discovered, evidence shows that the area was occupied by hominids over a period of nearly two million years [ [http://gsa.confex.com/gsa/inqu/finalprogram/abstract_55526.htm Quaternary Deposits at the Lesser Caucasus, The Armenian Corridor] ] .

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