Divje Babe perforated jaw fragment

brnivka

Source term: Schwirrholz / brnivka

brnivka: Slovenian bullroarer or whirring sound-maker; Schwirrholz: German 'whirring wood', Brodar's term.

The age is the solid part of this story. Layer 14 belongs to a deposit formed roughly 90,000–70,000 years ago—deep in Neanderthal time. The interpretation came first, under a different chronology. Mira Omerzel Terlep called the perforated cave-bear fragment seemingly made for a prehistoric brnivka and compatible with an amulet; Mitja Brodar adopted that possibility while arguing that Divje Babe I belonged with the Aurignacian. Later ESR dating removed that cultural setting without proving what the object was. If its hole is human-made, the fragment could be an extraordinary Neanderthal symbolic object. But a hole alone cannot distinguish ornament from tool, and no cord, use-wear study, measurement, or sounding test shows that it ever hung from a body or turned through the air.

Ploščat rogelj jamskega medveda z luknjo je kot ustvarjen za prazgodovinsko brnivko, ki seveda uporabe roglja kot amuleta ne izključuje, temveč le potrjuje.

The flat cave-bear coronoid process with a hole is as if made for a prehistoric bullroarer; this of course does not exclude use of the process as an amulet, but rather confirms it.

Omerzel Terlep 1998:171

Particulars

Object

A broad, broken cave-bear jaw fragment with a single perforation near one edge, excavated from Layer 14 in 1982.

Function

Not recorded.