Search results for "CAVE"
showing 10 items of 606 documents
The owl that never left! Taphonomy of Earlier Stone Age small mammal assemblages from Wonderwerk Cave (South Africa)
2022
Wonderwerk Cave, in South Africa, is an exceptional site that has yielded a large collection of small mammal fossils in a stratigraphic sequence reaching back ca. 2 million years. Taphonomic studies undertaken to date, show that Tytonidae (likely Tyto alba) was the dominant predator during the Earlier Stone Age. They produced masses of pellets that formed a dense carpet-like surface that covered the cave floor at intervals throughout the sequence. This paper compares the taphonomic signatures of five different Earlier Stone Age small mammal assemblages from Wonderwerk Cave, including assemblages not studied before, as well as a modern pellet assemblage collected from inside the cave. These …
A 4000-year long Late Holocene climate record from Hermes Cave (Peloponnese, Greece)
2020
The societal and cultural development during the Bronze Age and the subsequent Iron Age was enormous in Greece, however interrupted by two significant transformations around 4200 years b2k (Early Helladic II/III; b2k refers to years before 2000 CE) and 3200 years b2k (end of Late Helladic III). Artefacts and building remains provide some insights into the cultural evolution, but only little is known about environmental and climatic changes on a detailed temporal and spatial scale. Here we present a 4000-year long stalagmite record (GH17-05) from Hermes Cave, Greece, located on Mount Ziria in the close vicinity of the Late Bronze Age citadel of Mycenae and the Classical-Hellenistic polis of …
Landscape and fuel management in the context of prehistoric and historical occupations of Cova des Moro (Manacor, Mallorca, Spain)
2021
Abstract In this paper, the first results of charcoal analyses carried out at Cova des Moro (Manacor, Mallorca, Spain) are presented. This cave is an archaeological but also palaeontological site that provides information on endemic fauna (the extinct caprine Myotragus balearicus) before the arrival of humans and, later, the relationship between the first farmers and the landscape. Several human occupations in the cave have been documented, from the Chalcolithic (end of the 3rd millennium cal BC), the Bronze Age (2nd millennium cal BC) and, finally, the Almohad period (13th century AD), during which the cave was used for different purposes. The first results of charcoal analyses at Cova des…
Speleothems from the Middle East: An Example of Water Limited Environments in the SISAL Database
2019
The Middle East (ME) spans the transition between a temperate Mediterranean climate in the Levant to hyper-arid sub-tropical deserts in the southern part of the Arabian Peninsula (AP), with the complex alpine topography in the northeast feeding the Euphrates and Tigris rivers which support life in the Southeastern Fertile Crescent (FC). Climate projections predict severe drying in several parts of the ME in response to global warming, making it important to understand the controls of hydro-climate perturbations in the region. Here we discuss 23 ME speleothem stable oxygen isotope (δ18Occ) records from 16 sites from the SISAL_v1 database (Speleothem Isotope Synthesis and Analysis database), …
Dietary evidence from Central Asian Neanderthals: A combined isotope and plant microremains approach at Chagyrskaya Cave (Altai, Russia).
2021
Neanderthals are known primarily from their habitation of Western Eurasia, but they also populated large expanses of Northern Asia for thousands of years. Owing to a sparse archaeological record, relatively little is known about these eastern Neanderthal populations. Unlike in their western range, there are limited zooarchaeological and paleobotanical studies that inform us about the nature of their subsistence. Here, we perform a combined analysis of carbon and nitrogen stable isotopes on bone collagen and microbotanical remains in dental calculus to reconstruct the diet of eastern Neanderthals at Chagyrskaya Cave in the Altai Mountains of Southern Siberia, Russia. Stable isotopes identify…
A conservation roadmap for the subterranean biome
2021
6 páginas.- 1 figuras.- 17 referencias.- Wynne JJ, Howarth FG, Mammola S, et al. A conservation roadmap for the subterranean biome. Conservation Letters. 2021; e12834. https://doi.org/10.1111/conl.12834
Late Quaternary changes in bat palaeobiodiversity and palaeobiogeography under climatic and anthropogenic pressure: new insights from Marie-Galante, …
2016
25 pages; International audience; Data on Lesser Antillean Late Quaternary fossil bat assemblages remains limited, leading to their general exclusion from studies focusing on Caribbean bat palaeobiodiversity and palaeobiogeography. Additionally, the role of climatic versus human pressure driving changes in faunal communities remains poorly understood. Here we describe a fossil bat assemblage from Blanchard Cave on Marie-Galante in the Lesser Antilles, which produced numerous bat remains from a well-dated, stratified context. Our study reveals the occurrence of at least 12 bat species during the Late Pleistocene and Early Holocene on Marie-Galante, whereas only eight species are currently kn…
New data on bat fossils from Middle and Upper Pleistocene localities of France
2011
We describe the bat fossils preserved in four sites from the middle and upper Pleistocene, three of them being well-known French localities: the rock shelter of Les Valerots, the caves of l’Escale at Saint Estève Janson and ‘‘du Prince’’ at Grimaldi (Italy), and the filling of Combe-Grenal, all of them containing microvertebrate assemblages with yet undescribed bat fossils. All species represented in these four localities are still presently distributed in France and had been previously recorded in other Pleistocene localities of central and western Europe, including France. The four assemblages differ both in the abundance of bat fossils as in species composition. The characteristics of ea…
Living in isolation for almost 40 years: molecular divergence of the 28S rDNA and COI sequences between French and Polish populations of the cave bee…
2021
The paper gives the results of the first studies on the molecular divergence between native and non-native populations of Speonomus normandi hydrophilus (Jeannel, 1907). This species is endemic to Massif Arize in the Central Pyrenees (France), and represents highly specialised organisms that live underground. In 1982, one hundred specimens of S. normandi hydrophilus had been experimentally introduced into the Dzwonnica Cave (Poland). Since then, a numerous population has developed in the Towarna-Dzwonnica cave system, and the neighbouring Cabanowa Cave. After almost 40 years of isolation between native and non-native populations, the genetic variations were examined using the COI and 28S rD…
The efficacy of whole human genome capture on ancient dental calculus and dentin
2019
Objectives Dental calculus is among the richest known sources of ancient DNA in the archaeological record. Although most DNA within calculus is microbial, it has been shown to contain sufficient human DNA for the targeted retrieval of whole mitochondrial genomes. Here, we explore whether calculus is also a viable substrate for whole human genome recovery using targeted enrichment techniques. Materials and methods Total DNA extracted from 24 paired archaeological human dentin and calculus samples was subjected to whole human genome enrichment using in-solution hybridization capture and high-throughput sequencing. Results Total DNA from calculus exceeded that of dentin in all cases, and altho…