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