The Combe Capelle burial is Holocene in age

So says this Past Horizons report. This is fairly important in that it joins a bunch of other modern Homo sapiens remain long thought to have been associated with the Aurignacian to recently have been directly dated and shown to be much more recent (Churchill and Smith 2000). One recent and well publicized case was that of the Vogelherd remains, which were redated to between 3.9-5kya as opposed to the 30+kya it was originally thought to date to (Conard et al. 2004).

In the case of Combe Capelle, the redating of the skeleton to ca. 9575BP (the report doesn't give the exact age range) is especially significant for two reasons. For one thing, it's one more blow to the idea that modern humans were in Europe from the very beginning of the Upper Paleolithic. For another thing, and perhaps most importantly, it conclusively dissociates this set of modern human bones from the Chatelperronian artifacts with which it was found. As I've argued before, who made the Chatelperronian is now hotly debated, and this new piece of the puzzle just makes the question even more intriguing.

Edit Also, check out this photo (included in the Past Horizons report) of Otto Hauser, who discovered the burial, posing with the remains themselves... you just don't see photos like that in paleoanthropology anymore!

© Wegner Archive

References:

Churchill SE, & Smith FH (2000). Makers of the early Aurignacian of Europe. American journal of physical anthropology, Suppl 31, 61-115 PMID: 11123838

Conard, N., Grootes, P., & Smith, F. (2004). Unexpectedly recent dates for human remains from Vogelherd Nature, 430 (6996), 198-201 DOI: 10.1038/nature02690

Paleolithic whodunnit: Who made the Chatelperronian?

The Chatelperronian is a lithic industry that springs up for several thousand years during the transition from Middle to Upper Paleolithic industries. Its precise age is debated, but it clearly is associated with this interval. One of the reasons the Chatelperronian is the subject of so much debate is because, since the discovery of a Neanderthal in a Chatelperronian level at the site of
St. Césaire in 1978, it has widely been believed that Neandertals were the makers of this industry. This is important because up to that point, the Chatelperronian had been considered a true 'Upper Paleolithic' culture. Since the Upper Paleolithic had been thought to correspond to the arrival of modern Homo sapiens in Europe, the St. Cesaire discovery - and the association of Neanderthals with the Upper Paleolithic - meant that this association needed to be rethought. This has led to two main perspectives: those who see the Chatelperronian as an independent development by Neanderthals (d'Errico et al. 1998), and those who see the Chatelperronian as the result of the acculturation of Neanderthals by modern humans (Mellars 2005). The key thing here is that, in spite of much acrimonious debate between the two perspectives, both fundamentally attribute the Chatelperronian (and other coeval 'transitional' industries like the Uluzzian and Szeletian) to Neanderthals.

This may be about to change. In a short paper in press in the Journal of Human Evolution, Bar-Yosef and Bordes (2010) question this fundamental association in light of a revision of the two sites on the Neanderthal-Chatelperronian association is based: Grotte du Renne at Arcy-sur-Cure, and St. Césaire at La Roche à Pierrot, both in France. At Grotte du Renne, the authors suggest that the Neanderthal remains were incorporated into Chatelperronian deposits as a result of that layer's occupants digging into the Mousterian layer when they first settled into the cave. Thus, the Neanderthal bits would come from the Mousterian levels below. To them, such mixing is indicated by 1) the position of the remains (near the cave mouth) where dug up dirt would have been dumped, 2) the presence of a dug hearth indicating digging did take place, 3) a decrease in the number of teeth from the bottom to the top of the Chatelperronian levels, and 4) dicrepancies between radiocarbon dates and the stratigraphy of the late Mousterian and Chatelperronian layers.I think this is a fair argument, especially considering that the site was excavated prior to the establishment of the complete excavation methods used today, as the authors also underline.

At St. Césaire, where the the secondary burial of a Neanderhal was found in the Chatelperronian, Bar-Yosef and Bordes argue that the presence of distinct 'Mousterian' and 'Chatelperronian' components of the lithic industry and the fact that not all artifacts show a similar state of preservation suggest caution is needed before we can accept that it was not a mix of Mousterian and Chatelperronian levels. Because the burial is found in the upper (of two) Chatelperronian level, they argue that it was probably not deposited by occupants of the site anyway, implying that Neanderthals who did not make Chatelperronian tools might have buried one of their deceased at St. Césaire, perhaps in an effort to mark the site as theirs following the arrival of whoever made the Chatelperronian.

In my view, Bar-Yosef and Bordes' case is much stronger for Grotte du Renne than it is for St. Césaire, especially since bone refitting at St. Césaire has recently demonstrated that mixing between the Mousterian and the Chatelperronain was a negligible occurrence at the site (Morin et al. 2005). The need to invoke an explanation that doens't depend strictly on stratigraphic of artifactual data also weakens their overall argument. I say this because if their argument is followed to its logical end, it would mean that, even if you found that unheard of goody that would be a site containing only Chatelperronian layers and thus could exclude stratigrpahic mixing as an explanation, the presence of Neanderthal remains (or at least of a secondary Neanderthal burial) could still be explained away as a result of self-affirming Neanderthals claiming a stake to a given bit of territory. That's not to say that it's impossible, of course, and I will concede that the St. Césaire burial is the only relatively undisputed case of a Neanderthal secondary burial, so the practice was never common and who knows what it really might have meant, as the authors concede. Given that this is the case, though, you wouldn't expect a very unusual behavior to be the preferred manner in which Neanderthals would have marked their territories in the context of encounters with new groups of hominins.

In any case, Bar-Yosef and Bordes raise the specter that Neanderthals may not have been the makers of the Chatelperronian. They're circumspect in their conclusions of what this might mean, suggesting that archaeologists "should therefore start afresh, testing hypotheses about the hominins responsible for the formation of Chatelperronian contexts" rather than assume anything about their makers based on the potential unfounded assumption that they were Neanderthals. This is a view that I have a lot of sympathy for, having myself argued for the need for a similar perspective when interpreting the Uluzzian 'transitional' industry of southern Italy (Riel-Salvatore 2009, 2010 - go ahead, treat yourself and click, you'll find free pdfs). Ultimately, though, the revision proposed by Bar-Yosef and Bordes needs to be taken cautiously, especially as it concerns the St. Cesaire remains. One thing it doesn't do is associate the Chatelperronian with modern humans, though that's certainly one of the possible correlates of their paper, especially when they rail against 'continuity models' of human evolution in their conclusion. That said, if this revision and others like it have the beneficial result of getting people to carefully excavate and document new sites bearing 'transitional' assembalge, I'm all for them!


References:

Bar-Yosef, O., & Bordes, J.G. (2010). Who were the makers of the Châtelperronian culture? Journal of Human Evolution DOI: 10.1016/j.jhevol.2010.06.009

d'Errico, F., Zilhao, J., Julien, M., Baffier, D., & Pelegrin, J. (1998). Neanderthal Acculturation in Western Europe? A Critical Review of the Evidence and Its Interpretation Current Anthropology, 39 (S1) DOI: 10.1086/204689

Mellars, P. (2005). The impossible coincidence. A single-species model for the origins of modern human behavior in Europe Evolutionary Anthropology: Issues, News, and Reviews, 14 (1), 12-27 DOI: 10.1002/evan.20037

Morin, E., Tsanova, T., Sirakov, N., Rendu, W., Mallye, J., & Lévêque, F. (2005). Bone refits in stratified deposits: testing the chronological grain at Saint-Césaire Journal of Archaeological Science, 32 (7), 1083-1098 DOI: 10.1016/j.jas.2005.02.009

Riel-Salvatore, J. (2010). A Niche Construction Perspective on the Middle–Upper Paleolithic Transition in Italy Journal of Archaeological Method and Theory DOI: 10.1007/s10816-010-9093-9

All You Ever Wanted to Know about Grotte des Fées de Châtelperron.... Almost

The latest issue of PaleoAnthropology is out, and it's a good one... it contains not one, not two but three papers about whether or not claims that there is an Aurignacian-Châtelperronian interstratification at Grotte des Fées de Châtelperron (Gravina et al. 2005, Mellars et al. 2007), the type-site of the Châtelperronian technocomplex. Since PaleoAnthropology is an open-access journal, all these papers are available as freely downloadable PDFs, along with another one and several book reviews, including one by yours truly.

The first is a long and detailed paper by Zilhão and colleagues that builds on their prior short rebuttal of Gravina et al.'s case (Zilhão et al. 2006) . In this new publication, they provide a detailed history of research at the site, an in-depth assessment of the stratigraphy documented at the site by prior researchers, as well as a review of the archaeological material recovered from both the Châtelperronian and the Mousterian deposits at the site (Zilhão et al. 2008a). This is accompanied by a reply by Mellars and Gravina (2008), in which they criticize what they consider to be Zilhão et al.'s unnecessarily complex and convoluted arguments against the presence of an interstratification. The series concludes with a reply by Zilhao et al. (2008b) entitled "Like Hobbes' Chimney Birds" in which they accuse Mellars and Gravina of not paying sufficient attention to the substance of the arguments which they raised in their refutation of the interstratification thesis at Grotte des Fées de Châtelperron.

I've been doing more thinking about this issue lately myself, so I'll probably have more to say about these papers in short order. In any case, mark my words when I say that this will not be the last exchange about this issue, especially since the wording of all three papers leaves no doubt about the unfortunately unsurprising fact that neither camp has been swayed by the other's arguments. While there are other ways of looking at the relevant data, these papers focus on the 'nitty gritty' of identifying relevant artifacts and their position within the deposits. Not that there's anything wrong with that, quite the opposite, but at this point of the debate it might also be important to start thinking a bit more about how to actually identify interstratifications 9so people can agree on the baseline criteria necessary to define them) and, if they do exist, what they might mean beyond the fact that people making different artifacts were occupying the same spots over timespans of several thousand years. I've already blogged about some of these issues before (and also here), but there definitely remains much to be done on that front.

References:

Gravina, B., Mellars, P., and Bronk Ramsey, C. 2005. Radiocarbon dating of interstratified Neanderthal and early modern human occupations at the Chatelperronian type-site. Nature 438: 51–56.

Mellars, P.A., Gravina, B., and Bronk Ramsey, C. 2007. Confirmation of Neanderthal/modern human interstratification at the Chatelperronian type-site. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA 104: 3657–3662.

Mellars, Paul, and Brad Gravina. 2008. Châtelperron: Theoretical Agendas, Archaeological Facts, and Diversionary Smoke-Screens. PaleoAnthropology 2008: 43-64.

Zilhão J., d’Errico, F., Bordes, J.-G., Lenoble, A., Texier, J.-P., and Rigaud, J.-Ph. 2006. Analysis of Aurignacian interstratification at the Châtelperronian-type site and implications for the behavioral modernity of Neandertals. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA 103: 12643–12648.

Zilhão, João, Francesco d'Errico, Jean-Guillaume Bordes, Arnaud Lenoble, Jean-Pierre Texier, and Jean-Philippe Rigaud. 2008a. Grotte des Fées (Châtelperron): History of Research, Stratigraphy, Dating, and Archaeology of the Châtelperronean Type-Site.
PaleoAnthropology 2008: 1-42.

Zilhão, João, Francesco d'Errico, Jean-Guillaume Bordes, Arnaud Lenoble, Jean-Pierre Texier, and Jean-Philippe Rigaud. 2008b. Like Hobbes' Chimney Birds PaleoAnthropology 2008: 65-67.