In 1938–39, a Soviet field team led by A. P. Okladnikov excavated a small limestone grotto in the Baisun-Tau (Baysun) mountains of southern Uzbekistan that would become one of Central Asia’s most famous Paleolithic sites. Over two seasons they opened roughly 137 square meters of deposits and documented a sequence of repeated Mousterian occupations, hearths, abundant faunal remains, and, most strikingly, the shallow burial of a Neanderthal child surrounded by paired mountain goat horns.
The site’s stratigraphy revealed several discrete occupation horizons, each marked by hearths and concentrations of stone artifacts and butchered bone. The stone industry is classically Mousterian in character (a Middle Paleolithic technocomplex generally associated with Neanderthals, ca. ~300,000–40,000 years ago), made primarily on locally available siliceous limestone, jasper and quartzite cobbles and slabs. Hearths, burned lenses, and repeated concentrations of food refuse show the cave was a recurring short-term camp for Paleolithic hunters.
The burial is the site’s enduring legacy. In a shallow pit cut into sterile deposits beneath the latest occupation layer, excavators found the remains of a child (originally estimated about 8–10 years old) with at least five pairs of Siberian mountain-goat (Capra sibirica) horns arranged around the body. The arrangement and association have long been interpreted as deliberate and potentially ritual in nature rather than mere chance accumulation.
Subsequent morphological and molecular studies have confirmed the child’s Neanderthal affinity: geometric morphometrics of cranial elements and mtDNA analyses both place Teshik-Tash within the Neanderthal population. This makes the Teshik-Tash burial one of the easternmost, and most important, records for Neanderthal presence in Central Asia.
Teshik-Tash demonstrates repeated Mousterian use of highland caves in Central Asia, complex mortuary behavior associated with a child burial, and technological choices shaped by the local raw-material economy (heavy reliance on siliceous limestone and river pebbles rather than abundant true flint). Together these features expand our view of Neanderthal-range and behavior beyond Europe and the Levant into interior Asia, and they continue to prompt questions about population dispersals and cultural transmission in the Middle Paleolithic.
Excavation was led by A. P. Okladnikov with colleagues including V. D. Zaporozhskaia and assistants I. F. Lamaev and D. N. Kalashnikov. Later seasons added specialists in geology and faunal analysis. The full Russian monograph (the basis for this summary) documents the field record in detail and remains the primary source for the excavation’s stratigraphy and finds.