Mannheim – Hippos still romped across the Rhine about 30,000 years ago: this is the finding of an interdisciplinary research team that evaluated hundreds of bones as part of the “Ice Age Window Upper Rhine Rift” project, as the Reiss-Engelhorn Museum Mannheim made the announcement on Wednesday.
What is fantastic about the research result is the time when “Hippopotamus Amphibius” was still living in this area. The current state of knowledge was that heat-loving species became extinct at the end of the last warm period 116,000 years ago.
According to the examinations of experts from the Reiss-Engelhorn-Museum, the Kurt-Engelhorn-Zentrum Archaeometry and the University of Potsdam, it should be revised. Using the radiocarbon method, they found that hippos still lived in the Upper Rhine region between 48,000 and 30,000 years before our time.
«So the hippopotamus is a real ice age resident on the Rhine. This suggests that the animals were able to adapt to the associated temperature and environmental conditions in the colder Upper Rhine Rift,” explained Wilfried Rosendahl, director general of the museum in Mannheim. The Upper Rhine Graben stretches from Basel to Frankfurt.
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