Radiocarbon dates from the Grotte du Renne and Saint-Césaire support a Neandertal origin for the Châtelperronian

Abstract

The transition from the Middle Paleolithic (MP) to Upper Paleolithic (UP) is marked by the replacement of late Neandertals by modern humans in Europe between 50,000 and 40,000 y ago. Châtelperronian (CP) artifact assemblages found in central France and northern Spain date to this time period. So far, it is the only such assemblage type that has yielded Neandertal remains directly associated with UP style artifacts. CP assemblages also include body ornaments, otherwise virtually unknown in the Neandertal world. However, it has been argued that instead of the CP being manufactured by Neandertals, site formation processes and layer admixture resulted in the chance association of Neanderthal remains, CP assemblages, and body ornaments. Here, we report a series of accelerator mass spectrometry radiocarbon dates on ultrafiltered bone collagen extracted from 40 well-preserved bone fragments from the late Mousterian, CP, and Protoaurignacian layers at the Grotte du Renne site (at Arcy-sur-Cure, France). Our radiocarbon results are inconsistent with the admixture hypothesis. Further, we report a direct date on the Neandertal CP skeleton from Saint-Césaire (France). This date corroborates the assignment of CP assemblages to the latest Neandertals of western Europe. Importantly, our results establish that the production of body ornaments in the CP postdates the arrival of modern humans in neighboring regions of Europe. This new behavior could therefore have been the result of cultural diffusion from modern to Neandertal groups.

Neandertal-Modern Human Contact in Western Eurasia: Issues of Dating, Taxonomy, and Cultural Associations

“…The direct radiocarbon dating of the skeleton to 36,200 ± 750 14 C BP (OxA-18099; Hublin et al 2012a , that is, to 39.6-42.5 ka cal BP, has clarifi ed the picture in at least one way: under the assumption that the result is accurate, the dating unambiguously rejects the hypothesis that the St.-Césaire Neandertal is associated with the Mousterian component of EJOPsup. However, since the age range obtained overlaps the boundary between the chronostratigraphic time slots of the Châtelperronian and the Protoaurignacian in France, the dating does not reject that the skeleton relates to the latter instead of the former.…”

“…Where the western part is concerned, however, Hublin et al ( 2012a ) This claim is unsupported, as shown by Banks et al's ( 2013 ) Bayesian modeling of the chronology of the Protoaurignacian. The oldest of the lower limits of these authors' 95.4 % confi dence intervals for Isturitz's modeled cal BP results is 41,840, and the corresponding youngest upper limit is 40,078; both are fully consistent with the 39.9-41.5 ka cal BP range modeled for the entire technocomplex.…”

“…In radiocarbon years BP, the six results obtained for the Protoaurignacian place it after 35,250 ± 280, while the six obtained for the Châtelperronian place it between 37,400 ± 500 and 42,410 ± 400. In calendar years, these Les Cottés results place the site's Protoaurignacian in the younger part of Banks et al's ( 2013 ) 39.9-41.5 ka cal BP interval for this culture as a whole, and the site's Châtelperronian in full contemporaneity with the ~41-45 ka cal BP interval obtained for the Grotte du Renne by Hublin et al ( 2012a ).…”

“…The Châtelperronian yielded a juvenile temporal bone and 29 teeth of undisputed Neandertal affi nities (Hublin et al 1996(Hublin et al , 2012aBailey and Hublin 2006 ), as well as 39 objects of personal ornamentation, 1,615 pigment chunks (weighing a total of 17 kg, and mostly red ochre), and 139 worked bone items of a diverse typology (mostly awls) (Caron et al 2011 ;Fig. 3.2 ).…”

The open-air site of Tolbor 16 (Northern Mongolia): Preliminary results and perspectives

“…In addition, two 14 C-AMS dates were obtained on bone samples from the newly discovered Tolbor 21 site , Gladyshev et al, 2013. Samples were selected for dating when showing a satisfying amount of collagen yield (>1%) (Ambrose, 1990,Weber et al, 2005Hublin et al, 2012) and C:N between 2.9 and 3.5 (Klinken, 1999). The samples were pretreated at MPI-EVA Leipzig using the method described in Talamo and Richards (2011).…”