Kozarnika

Kozarnika (Bulgarian: Козарника, "the goat shed") is a cave in northwestern Bulgaria that was used as a hunters’ shelter as early as the Lower Paleolithic (1.4-1.6 million BP). It marks an older route of early humans from Africa to Europe via the Balkans, prior to the currently suggested route across Gibraltar, and probably keeps the earliest evidence of human symbolic behaviour ever found. Here have been found the earliest European Gravette flint assemblages.

Kozarnika cave is located 6 km from the town of Belogradchik in northwestern Bulgaria, on the northern slopes of the Balkan mountain, close to the Lower Danubian plain. It is opened to the south, at 85 m above the valley. With its length of 210 m, the cave is among the small-sized in the Belogradchick karst region but studies in the last two decades uncovered 21 geological layers there, containing (moving upwards) archaeological complexes of Early Lower Paleolithic (layers 13 - 11a), Middle Paleolithic (layers 10b - 9a), Early Upper Paleolithic (layer 6/7), a sequence of an original Paleolithic bladelets industry with backed pieces that scholars called Kozarnikian (layers 5c - 3a), Early Neolithic, Late Copper age, Late Bronze Age, Medieval and Late medieval periods.