Murzak-Koba

a Mesolithic grotto in the Crimea, in the vicinity of Sevastopol’. It was discovered by the Soviet scholars S. N. Bibikov and E. V. Zhirov in 1936. The excavations revealed Tardenoisian-type microliths, bones of modern-type animals, and many snail shells. A Mesolithic Cro-Magnon burial of a man and woman was also discovered; the skeletons lay in a supine position in a shallow pit. The last phalanges of the little finger of both hands of the woman had been chopped off while she was alive as a kind of ritual mutilation.