Composition of primary cosmic rays beyond the ''knee'' from emulsion chamber observations

We show that the simplest assumptions for the dynamics of particle production allow us to understand the fluxes of hadrons and photons at mountain altitudes as well as the structure of individual events. The. analysis requires a heavy nuclear component of primary cosmic rays above the ''knee'' in the spectrum with an average mass number [A] = 7.3+/-0.9.5495558556