BONN, Sept 9: Scientists working at the famed Neanderthal cave site in Germany on Monday announced the discovery of bones of a large Neanderthal male, a “petite” Neanderthal adult and a small child - instantly spawning media speculation that the trio could be history’s first recorded “cave-man family”.

The discoveries were made at the historic site where the original “Neanderthal Man” was discovered in 1856, a site which had been lost for decades and which researchers only managed to rediscover just five years ago.

Since then thousands of bone fragments along with paleolithic tools have been brought to the service and catalogued.

The “cave-man family” discovery actually consists of multiple discoveries made over the past two years at the famed site in cliffs along the Neander River south of Duesseldorf, Tuebingen University paleo-archaeologist Ralf W. Schmitz told Deutsche Presse-Agentur dpa Monday.

Months of painstaking research revealed that the bone fragments were those of two adults and the baby teeth of a child.

One of the two adults, based on portions of a right humerus arm bone and both elbow joints, “was considerably more petite than the 1856 find”, Schmitz told dpa.

Those “petite” bones were among 60 human skeletal fragments and stone tools found by Schmitz and co-researcher Juergen Thissen at the cave site where quarrymen in the 19th Century stumbled upon the first Neanderthal Man.

The bones from the latest find languished in a sack for months pending meticulous sorting and classification. Only recently did American anthropologist Fred H. Smith of Loyola University in Chicago verify beyond any doubt that they were in fact Neanderthal remains dating back 42,000 years, Schmitz said.

“We have no scientific proof one way or the other that these individuals even knew each other,” he said. Carbon 14 dating had pinpointed their age to approximately 40,000 B.C. - “give or take 20 generations or so”.—dpa