Optical and radiocarbon dating at Jinmium rock shelter in northern Australia

Roberts, Richard G.; Bird, Michael I.; Olley, Jon; Galbraith, R. F.; Lawson, Ewan; Laslett, G. M.; Yoshida, Hiroyuki; Jones, Rhys; Fullagar, Richard; Jacobsen, Geraldine; Hua, Quan

doi:10.1038/30718

Cited by 359 publications

(136 citation statements)

References 30 publications

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“…Subsequent resampling for OSL and AMS 14 C dating has radically reduced the maximum age for the deposits. Small samples of charcoal from the cultural layers treated with either A/B/A or strong oxidation chemistry yielded 14 C dates in the range 80-3870 BP; OSL dates agree with the 14 C where direct comparisons were made and suggest that the all the cultural deposits are Holocene (Roberts et al 1998a;. AMS 14 C dating of oxalate carbon from rock varnish also suggests that the pecked cupule artwork is most probably of Holocene age (Watchman et al 2000).…”

Section: Additional Sites Where New Osl Methods Have Been Importantsupporting

confidence: 49%

Dating the First Australians

Gillespie¹

2002

Radiocarbon

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ABSTRACT. The dating of selected archaeological and megafaunal sites from the Australian region is reviewed, with emphasis on recent work at some of the oldest sites. Improved chemical procedures with decreased analytical background for 14 C analysis, combined with new luminescence dating methods, has confirmed many of the results processed decades ago and significantly increased the maximum age for some others. The oldest occupation horizons in four different regions reliably dated by defendable multi-method results are in the range 42-48,000 calendar years ago, overlapping with the age range for similarly well-dated undisturbed sites containing the youngest extinct megafauna. There is less secure evidence suggesting some archaeology may be earlier and some megafauna may have survived later than this period. INTRODUCTIONEstimates of the time since humans first occupied the extended Late Pleistocene continent Sahul (sometimes called Greater Australia or Meganesia) have steadily increased since systematic archaeological excavation and radiocarbon dating became established in the 1960s. Jones (1968) considered 30,000 BP a reasonable estimate for the earliest arrivals, based on the available evidence showing 3 or 4 sites with 14 C dates of more than 20,000 BP. In the second edition of The Prehistory of Australia (Mulvaney 1975) an appended date list documented four sites in Australia and one in New Guinea with 14 C results older than 25,000 BP. The current edition (Mulvaney and Kamminga 1999) provides an overview of the hundreds of dates now accumulated for Late Pleistocene archaeological sites in Sahul. Some of the robust debate about claims for earliest occupation of the region is presented in Murray (1998).Traditional 14 C dating using radiometric counting has become less important in Sahul, as elsewhere, since accelerator mass spectrometry (AMS) laboratories began to take on large workloads from the mid 1980s. In many situations this new measurement technology also allowed better pretreatment chemistry to be applied in the isolation and decontamination of specific sample components. At about the same time newer thermoluminescence (TL), optically stimulated luminescence (OSL), electron spin resonance (ESR), amino acid racemization (AAR), and uranium-thorium series (U/Th) dating methods began to make significant contributions to archaeology and the earth sciences. These and other techniques operate under different rules and on different materials to 14 C. An "archaeological event" such as a fire may sensibly be 14 C dated using charcoal, whereas luminescence methods on quartz sand are likely to be dating an "environmental event" such as exposure to sunlight, not necessarily directly associated with the target archaeological event. However, since everyone should eventually get the same answer to questions like "when did humans first colonize Australia" or "when did the megafauna become extinct" there are some instructive examples of cross-dating with different numerical methods.Projects such as dating the first Au...

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Section: Additional Sites Where New Osl Methods Have Been Importantsupporting

confidence: 49%

Dating the First Australians

Gillespie¹

2002

Radiocarbon

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“…As a direct test of that proposition, we applied single-grain optical dating methods to a set of six sediment samples from the Jinmium deposit. The results were dramatic and unequivocal: the occupation deposit was much younger than had been suggested using TL, and the reason was that most of the grains in the deposit had not been sufficiently bleached by sunlight to reset their luminescence clocks (Roberts et al, 1998a(Roberts et al, , 1999. Some of the grains had very high ages, consistent with their being derived from rubble.…”

supporting

confidence: 59%

“…One of the important findings of the single-grain OSL studies at Jinmium (Roberts et al, 1998a(Roberts et al, , 1999 and Malakunanja II (Roberts et al, 1998b) is our ability to detect grains that have been displaced into older deposits from younger (overlying) strata. In both studies we used quartz grains of 90-125 µm diameter for optical dating and, at both sites, a small number of grains were found to have intruded into older deposits.…”

Section: Carbon Chronologiesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Humanity from African Naissance to Coming Millennia

Tobias¹,

Raath²,

Moggi‐Cecchi³

et al. 2001

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The first 2.5 million years of hominid history is characterized by limited dispersals similar to those of the living great apes whose home range sizes very little between years. Unlike our closest relative Pan, who are particulary vulnerable during dispersal because the distribution of their resources is highly habitat specific and predation takes a relatively higher toll than it does in r-selected animals, hominids are widely dispersed after 1.8 Ma. Hominid dispersal must have entailed either a shift in the types of resources exploited or a technological advance to ensure resource availability or both. Using data from ecology, geochronology, morphology, and paleontology we assess the initial hominid dispersal from Africa and the relationship to patterns of dispersal in nonhuman primates and large mammals of both 'widely dispersing' and 'non-dispersing' species. The dispersal rates of Plio/Pleistocene hominids differ from those of nonhuman primates and are typical of widely-dispersing large mammals. In fact, H. erectus first appears in Java almost immediately after its appearence in Africa, yet its first appearence in Java is contemporaneous with that of Colobus, Macaca, and Pongo that had already inhabited mainland Asia for millions of years. Although the timing of the first hominid dispersal pre-dates significant technological advances, the energy required by larger hominid body/brain sizes suggest a shift to exploitation of highprotein packages that, according to correlation between faunal and chronometric sequences, is itself dispersing. These data suggest that it is at the origin of H. erectus (sensu lato) that our uniquely human dispersal capabilities began to emerge and that this dispersal is not primarily due to the technological innovation of the Acheulean tradition. IntroductionThe global distribution of Homo sapiens contrasts with the restricted ranges of our closest living primate relative, Pan. Yet for some three million years after our lineages diverged, both were apparently exclusively African phenomena, as Pan remains today. These current biogeographic differences are reflected in home range (HR) sizes that are some 15 to 100 times greater in recent human huntergatherers than in Pan. (23 hectares in Pan, 330-2600 in humans; Leonard and Robertson, 2000). Although an extensive literature considers the significance of the behavioral repertoire that allows the final, relatively late, dispersal of Homo sapiens into Australasia, North and South America, and Siberia (e.g., Lindly & Clark, 1990;Roberts et al., 1991; Davidson & Noble, 1992; Jelinek, 1994; Waters et al., 1997), the origin of this difference in dispersal patterns is not well understood.The original hominid dispersal from Africa has been viewed as a largely hominid (technologically) driven rather than ecologically driven phenomenon. Such scenarios are based on the idea that widely dispersed ex-African hominids are not found before 1.0 ma (Pope, 1983) or are not found before the development of the Acheulean (Wolpoff, 1999), and thus that th...

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“…The former sources include: post depositional mixing of grains from adjacent sedimentary layers (e.g. Roberts et al, 1998 andBateman et al, 2003Bateman et al, , 2007aFeathers et al, 2006;Jacobs et al, 2006;David et al, 2007) and dosing, poor or heterogeneous bleaching of grains prior to burial (e.g. Olley et al, 2004;Bøtter-Jensen et al, 2000;Murray and Olley, 2002;Olley et al, 1999Olley et al, , 2004, and dosing, particularly at the micro-scale in the beta-radiation field such as betadose heterogeneity in the natural burial environment (e.g.…”

Section: The Sources Of Uncertainty and Scatter Of D E Estimatementioning

confidence: 99%

“…Murray and Wintle, 2000) has enabled D e estimates to be obtained from subsamples ('aliquots') composed of a few hundreds of grains or a few tens, and even from single grains (e.g. Roberts et al, 1998Roberts et al, , 1999Jacobs et al, 2003;Olley et al, 2004).…”

Section: Optically-stimulated Luminescence (Osl) Dating Of the Ira4 Amentioning

confidence: 99%

Employing Minimum age model (MAM) and Finite mixture modeling (FMM) for OSL age determination of two important samples from Ira Trench of North Tehran Fault

2016

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Ira trench site is in a point where, the surface trace of North Tehran Fault (NTF) joins the Mosha Fault (MF) in the north-eastern margin of Tehran and can provide important paleosismological information for Tehran. The Ira trench, were divided into 6 packages (I to VI), described, according to their composition, relative and absolute ages. Package I consists of units 23, 25, 26, 27, 28, 29, 30 and 31. The whole package I mainly belongs to Holocene, and provides essential constraints for the recent paleo-earthquake activity of the EMF and NTF zone. Therefore, finding accurate ages for the units of this package is very important. Three colluvial wedges (units 23, 26, 28) are present between 20 and 36.5 m north in package I, which are assigned to 3 episodes of activity on Fault 13. Central age model (CAM) provided OSL ages of 35.0 ± 6.1, 7.3 ± 1.3, 6.4 ± 0.9 and 56 ± 6.5 ka for units 23, 26, 28 and 29, respectively. The conflicting ages of 56 ± 6.5 and 35.0 ± 6.1 ka (for units 23 and 29, respectively) as compared to the underlying younger units suggest that these ages are overestimated. MAM provided OSL ages of 13.1 ± 4.3 and 3.5 ± 0.4 ka for units 23 and 29, respectively. The contribution of the new statistical age model of sample IRA4 to the paleoseismic data is discussed.

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Optical and radiocarbon dating at Jinmium rock shelter in northern Australia

Cited by 359 publications

References 30 publications

Dating the First Australians

Dating the First Australians

Humanity from African Naissance to Coming Millennia

Employing Minimum age model (MAM) and Finite mixture modeling (FMM) for OSL age determination of two important samples from Ira Trench of North Tehran Fault

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