Earliest fossil twin burial?
The AP is reporting on the discovery of a double newborn burial near Krems, Austria. The remains are estimated at 27,000 years old, and were buried directly side-by-side along with a string of 31 beads and mammoth bones.
Not much detail in the story, although there is this:
Archaeologists are combing the area to see if the infants' mother is nearby, as giving birth to twins in that era would have been extremely difficult and potentially fatal.
Not to mention for the babies!
Mladec: 31,000 BP
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Mladec 1 (left) and 5 (right), lateral view
A new paper in Nature (May 19, 2005) by Eva Wild and colleagues reports new AMS dates from the Mladec hominid sample. This site has been considered to preserve one of the earliest modern human samples in Europe, but its date has been uncertain. A previous attempt to date a layer overlying the hominid sample resulted in a minimum date of 34,000 - 35,000 years ago (Svoboda et al. 2002), but that date has been questioned. The current paper begins with a great introductory paragraph that reviews the problem of early modern humans in Europe:
The Mladec site has significance for both human evolutionary and archaeological issues and the relevance of its remains has increased as a result of the recent dating of the purportedly Aurignacian-age modern human remains from Velika Pecina (Croatia), Hahnofersand (Germany) and Vogelherd (Germany) to the Holocene epoch, the remains from Koneprusy (Czech Republic) to the Magdalenian period, and those from Cro-Magnon (France) and La Rochette (France) to the Gravettian period. The only directly dated European modern human fossils of Aurignacian age are the Pestera cu Oase (Romania) mandible and cranium at ~35,000 14C years before present (that is, ~35 14C kyr BP), the Kent's Cavern (UK) maxilla at ~31 14C kyr BP, the Pestera Muierii (Romania) remains at ~30 14C kyr BP, and the Pestera Cioclovina (Romania) cranium at ~29 14C kyr BP, none of which has a secure and diagnostic archaeological association. Moreover, at least the Oase fossils overlap in time with late Neanderthals from for example, Vindija (Croatia), which is at present dated to ~29 14C kyr BP and Arcy-sur-Cure (France) at ~34 14C kyr BP. The assessment of whether the Mladec fossils are indeed Aurignacian in age, and if so, their chronological position within the Aurignacian time span, has become central to understanding early modern humans in Europe (Wild et al. 2005:332, references omitted).
"Secure and diagnostic archaeological association" is the key element here. There were some modern humans in Europe early, although it is not yet clear that they coexisted in any one place with Neandertals. The Oase remains are sufficient to show the early appearance of the modern human anatomical pattern in Eastern Europe; the appearance in central Europe at Mladec is the subject of the present paper. What there isn't -- as yet -- is any evidence for the idea that modern humans spread new Upper Paleolithic industries into and across Europe.
The directly dated specimens include Mladec 1, 2, 8, 9a, and 25c. Mladec 25c is an ulna, the rest of the specimens were dated from teeth. The dates range from a high of 31,500 (for Mladec 9a) to a low of 26,330 (for Mladec 25c), with most of the specimens between 30,000 and 31,500 radiocarbon years. At this date, the Mladec sample is the oldest modern human sample associated with the later Aurignacian.
There is as yet no diagnostic hominid associated with the earliest Aurignacian. At 31,000 years, Mladec falls nearly 10,000 years after the earliest occurrence of "Aurignacian" assemblages, although what constitutes "Aurignacian" differs a lot between different archaeologists. Since "what is Neandertal" differs a lot between paleoanthropologists, I guess it's only fair.
References:
Svoboda JA, van der Plicht J, and Kuzelka V. 2002. Upper Paleolithic and Mesolithic human fossils from Moravia and Bohemia (Czech Republic): some new 14C dates. Antiquity 76:957-962.
Wild EM, Teschler-Nicola M, Kutschera W, Steier P, Trinkaus E, and Wanek W. 2005. Direct dating of Early Upper Paleolithic human remains from Mladec. Nature 435:332-335. Nature online
Washington Post on Pestera cu Oase
This article is about nine months old now, but one of my students brought me a clipping, so I thought I would pass it along. It is a good story about the Pestera cu Oase discovery.
At the start of each day's nine-hour excursion underground, team members stepped into a frigid mountain river that flows into a cave, their helmet-mounted lights piercing the perpetual fog of the cave's 100 percent humidity. As the equipment-laden crew sloshed past stalagmites, the cave narrowed and the air temperature plunged from the 90s to the upper 40s Fahrenheit.
Further in, the ceiling lowered until they were forced, first, to swim on their backs and, finally, don their diving masks and enter a narrow, 80-foot-long underwater passage called "the sump." Underwater visibility was about three feet.
Nice work on why the fossils are important:
Trinkaus made a CT scan of the face to measure the unerupted teeth. "To find wisdom teeth that big," he said, "you have to go back 500,000 years."
In the fair-and-balanced section, the article quotes Richard Klein:
"There could have been interbreeding," Klein conceded. "But all the genetic evidence we have suggests that, if it occurred, it was remarkably rare."
This probably signals more about the reporter's choice of what would heighten the controversy than Klein's actual remarks. On the other hand, if you start hearing an archaeologist talk mainly about the genetic evidence, you have to wonder how weak the behavioral evidence has become.
Vilhonneur 1, skeleton of the artist as a young man
Dominique Henry-Gambier and colleagues report in the December Journal of Human Evolution on a newly-discovered cave near Vilhounneur, France, with Gravettian-style parietal art and a partial human skeleton:
A remarkable discovery in France raises anew the question of the relationship between parietal art and funerary practices. France is rich in Gravettian decorated caves, but human remains from this period (28-21,000 years BP) are very rare (Henry-Gambier, 2002). Consequently, the discovery of human and hyena remains in a decorated cave system at "Les Garennes" near the village of Vilhonneur (Charente), just 500 m from the well-known cave of Placard (Clottes et al., 1991), is extraordinary. This new find will result in important new data on the biology and behavior of the Gravettians as well as the disappearance of hyenas at the end of the upper Pleistocene. Here we report on the preliminary results of in-situ observations and radiometric dating of the remains (Henry-Gambier et al. 2007:747).
The skeleton was found in a difficult-to-access chamber with parietal art including a hand stencil:
The walls of the deepest (second) chamber are decorated with red dots, black bars, various traces of color, and a well-executed black hand stencil (Fig. 3a). On a flat surface delimited by concretions, black lines evoke a face (Fig. 3b). Nearby, the partial skeleton (ribs, vertebrae, sacrum, left and right os coxae, left and right femora and tibiae) of a young adult male human is dispersed across the surface of a limestone scree (Fig. 2b). The cranium (Fig. 4) is in a small, low gallery opened just below a painting.
The radiometric date for the skeleton is around 27,000 BP. A number of hyena skeletons from another part of the cave are around 1500 years older, and "were members of the last surviving Pleistocene populations." The authors do not take a position as to whether the human skeleton was a deliberate interment, but compare it to a similar instance from another site:
[T]his site brings to mind the decorated Gravettian cave of Cussac (Dordogne) where several human individuals were placed in bear wallows (Aujoulat et al., 2002).
References:
Henry-Gambier D, Beauval C, Airvaux J, Aujoulat N, Baratin JF, Buisson-Catil J. 2007. New hominid remains associated with Gravettian parietal art (Les Garennes, Vilhonneur, France). J Hum Evol 53:747-750. doi:10.1016/j.jhevol.2007.07.003
John Hawks Department of Anthropology
University of Wisconsin—Madison
Copyright © 2007 John Hawks