A reassessment of the presumed Torrener Bärenhöhle's Paleolithic human tooth

Torrener Barenhohle's cave is a corridor located about 810 m from Golling an der Salzach (Salzburg, Austria). The cave was discovered in 1924 by Hermann Gruber, an Austrian alpine guide. After the initial speleological survey (carried out by Fritz and Robert Odl), the cave was the subject of a paleontological excavation commissioned by the newly founded (in 1924) Natural Histor Museum in Salzburg (now Haus der Natur). The excavation unearthed an enormous amount of animal bones mostly belonging to Ursus spelaeus, for a total of more than 90 individuals. Since then, the cave has been called “Torrener B€arenh€ohle,” meaning “Bear Cave” (Klappacher and Knapczyk, 1979). In 1933, Kurt Ehrenberg identified five hollow bones among the cave findings as possible scrapers and awls (Ehrenberg, 1933, 1938), and in 1972, Ehrenberg identified even more (artificially) modified bones (Ehrenberg, 1972). Until 1971, the publications about this cave had always mentioned animal bones only, but Gaisberger later reported the presence of a human molar attributed to the 1924 Torrener Barenhohle's collection (typescript dated 1971 reporting the finding of the tooth in January 1971, the original was in the archive of the museum Haus der Natur). When Gaisberger identified the tooth among the bones from the “B€arenh€ohle,” he showed it to the museum geologist, Rudolf Vogeltanz, who verified the identification as a human molar. In contrast with the 1971 report, an inventory started on January 1,1968 (starting No. 4000) already listed a “left upper 6th molar of a Homo sapiens, leg. H. Gruber” as third entry (No. 4003; Fig. 1), indicating that the tooth had already been identified as human by that year. This inventory was laid out by Gustave Abel, then president of the Speleology Association of Salzburg (“Salzburger Hohlenverein,” today “Landesverein für H€ohlenkunde in Salzburg”). Abel consigned the inventory to the archive of the “Landesverein für Hohlenkunde;” nevertheless, the museum was not aware of the existence of this document until after Abel's death in 1994, when the list was handed over to the museum. This fact may explain the double “discovery” of the tooth in the museum collection in 1968 and 1971. Anyway, in both cases the finding of the tooth was attributed to the initial discoverer of the cave, H. Gruber, in 1924. In the museum inventory anddas an old label suggestsdalso in the exhibition of the “Haus der Natur,” the tooth was always attributed to H. sapiens, with no age given. Moreover, in an old label of the “Haus der Natur” Museum, the tooth is classified as an upper third molar (Supplementary Online Material (SOM) Fig. S1). Between 1965 and 1984, detailed excavations were carried out in the so called “Schlenkendurchgangsho€hle,” a cave approximately 14 km NE of “Torrener B€arenh€ohle.” The excavations were financed by the Austrian Academy of Sciences and coordinated by Ehrenberg and his student, Karl Mais. During these excavations, presumed stone artifacts were identified and dated between 40,000 and 30,000 years B.P. (Klappacher, 1992). These simple “Mousteriantype” stone tools gave rise to the assumption that the region was visited by ice-age hunters. Ehrenberg and Mais (1970) wrote that it is most likely “that the maker [of these tools]was the Neanderthal.” Consequently, the tooth found in nearby Torrener B€arenh€ohle was also attributed to H. neandertalensis in a review of local prehistoric findings (Urbanek, 1991). Subsequently, a copy of the tooth was prepared for the Museum Burg Golling (Gollingan der Salzach) and was there exhibited as a Neandertal molar. Obviously, this last classification casts doubt on the real taxonomy of the tooth, an issue that is not restricted to the Torrener B€arenh€ohle specimen but that affects several human remains discovered decades ago, for which scanty and ambiguous information are available (Benazzi et al., 2011a, c, 2014a; 2015). In this contribution, we investigate the tooth from Torrener Barenhohle's cave (hereafter called T.B.I). This tooth was microCTscanned to digitally study its external and internal morphology, and sampled for AMS radiocarbon dating to establish its taxonomy and chronology.