The Early to Middle Pleistocene Atapuerca caves and their vertebrates (Images)
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- The Early to Middle Pleistocene Atapuerca caves and their vertebrates (Images)
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Title
The Early to Middle Pleistocene Atapuerca caves and their vertebrates (Images)
Description
This paper competed for the 2006 Junior Researcher Open Zooarchaeology Prize.
Abstract: During the last decades, the research at the caves of the Atapuerca Hill (Sierra de Atapuerca, Burgos, Spain) has contributed significantly to our understanding of human evolution in Europe during the Early and Middle Pleistocene. One of the sites, Gran Dolina level 6, yields the earliest fossil human remains in Western Europe, giving place to the definition of a new human species named Homo antecessor. The human remains form part of a rich and diverse assemblage of fossil vertebrates accumulated in the cave by diverse factors, humans, hyenas, or raptorial birds for the smaller things. In the assemblage there are important age indicators as the arvicoline rodents Mimomys savini and Stenocranius gregaloides that gives an age of early Pleistocene for the human accumulation. Moreover, the Homo antecessor level is placed just below a paleomagnetic reversion that, after the above mentioned rodents, must be the Matuyama-Brunhes, thus indicating an age older than 780 ka. The Sierra de Atapuerca also yields the best collection of fossil hominids ever unearthed from a Middle Pleistocene site, the Homo heidelbergensis fossil remains from Sima de los Huesos and Trinchera Galería. The Sima de los Huesos cave sediments contain the skeletal remains of at least 28 individuals in a mud breccia underlying an accumulation of the Middle Pleistocene cave bear (Ursus deningeri). The aim of this communication is to show the distribution of the mammalian faunas in the Atapuerca sites after the studies of the research carry out by our team during the last decade.
Abstract: During the last decades, the research at the caves of the Atapuerca Hill (Sierra de Atapuerca, Burgos, Spain) has contributed significantly to our understanding of human evolution in Europe during the Early and Middle Pleistocene. One of the sites, Gran Dolina level 6, yields the earliest fossil human remains in Western Europe, giving place to the definition of a new human species named Homo antecessor. The human remains form part of a rich and diverse assemblage of fossil vertebrates accumulated in the cave by diverse factors, humans, hyenas, or raptorial birds for the smaller things. In the assemblage there are important age indicators as the arvicoline rodents Mimomys savini and Stenocranius gregaloides that gives an age of early Pleistocene for the human accumulation. Moreover, the Homo antecessor level is placed just below a paleomagnetic reversion that, after the above mentioned rodents, must be the Matuyama-Brunhes, thus indicating an age older than 780 ka. The Sierra de Atapuerca also yields the best collection of fossil hominids ever unearthed from a Middle Pleistocene site, the Homo heidelbergensis fossil remains from Sima de los Huesos and Trinchera Galería. The Sima de los Huesos cave sediments contain the skeletal remains of at least 28 individuals in a mud breccia underlying an accumulation of the Middle Pleistocene cave bear (Ursus deningeri). The aim of this communication is to show the distribution of the mammalian faunas in the Atapuerca sites after the studies of the research carry out by our team during the last decade.
Creator
Gloria Cuenca Bescós and Juan Rofes
Source
Rofes_Images.pdf
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Gloria Cuenca Bescós and Juan Rofes. "The Early to Middle Pleistocene Atapuerca caves and their vertebrates (Images)," in BoneCommons, Item #460, http://www.alexandriaarchive.org/bonecommons/items/show/460 (accessed February 3, 2012).
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