Emory PreHealth students, please read on to discover more information directly from the Case Western School of Dental Medicine about this amazing opportunity – the Manot Cave Arcaheological Dig for Predental Students!
A unique experience for predental or first-year dental students is the Manot Cave project. Manot Cave is in the northwest of Israel and the largest cave in Israel (~1000 sq. meters; 7 stories deep). It is a large, still active karstic cave and contains thousands of butchered faunal remains (primarily red deer) and hundreds of lithic artifacts (Middle & Late stone age ~ 240K – 40K years ago). It thus encompasses the important time period when modern humans left Africa and migrated to Eurasia. It also includes the time period when modern humans interacted with the closely related Neandertals.
Thus, Manot Cave holds great potential to shed light on the Old World dispersion of modern humans and their interaction with the Neandertals. This season led to the discovery of – two deciduous molars (1~9 months of age; 1~ 12 years of age), a human manubrium (breast bone), a calcaneus (heel bone) and two metatarsals (foot bones). These specimens are combined with a previously discovered human calvarium (skull cap) and an adult molar uncovered in 2011 both of which have been dated to ~55,000 years. It is highly likely that the excavations of these specimens in the bottom of the cave indicate that there are several undiscovered burials in the cave.
This project is a collaboration between CWRU, Tel Aviv University and Ben Gurion University. The program is structured so that the students rotate through each station learning how to accomplish multiple archeological tasks (excavation, dry and wet sieving, picking through the sieving materials, and data recording). The American students freely collaborate with the Israeli students, most of who were training to be professional archeologists. This international project is not only an important scientific program but it is also a wonderful opportunity for the American students to learn basic archeology and to work with their Israeli counterparts.
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