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Article Dans Une Revue Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America Année : 2010

A new Lower Pleistocene archeological site in Europe (Vallparadis, Barcelona, Spain)

K. Martinez
  • Fonction : Auteur
J. Garcia
  • Fonction : Auteur
E. Carbonell
  • Fonction : Auteur
J. Agusti
  • Fonction : Auteur
H.-A. Blain
  • Fonction : Auteur
F. Burjachs
  • Fonction : Auteur
I. Caceres
  • Fonction : Auteur
M. Gomez
  • Fonction : Auteur
R. Huguet
  • Fonction : Auteur

Résumé

Here we report the discovery of a new late Lower Pleistocene site named Vallparadís (Barcelona, Spain) that produced a rich archeological and paleontological sequence dated from the upper boundary of the Jaramillo subchron to the early Middle Pleistocene. This deposit contained a main archeological layer with numerous artifacts and a rich macromammalian assemblage, some of which bore cut marks, that could indicate that hominins had access to carcasses. Paleomagnetic analysis, electron spin resonance-uranium series (ESR-US), and the biostratigraphic chronological position of the macro- and micromammal and lithic assemblages of this layer reinforce the proposal that hominins inhabited Europe during the Lower Pleistocene. The archeological sequence provides key information on the successful adaptation of European hominins that preceded the well-known fossil population from Atapuerca and succeeded the finds from Orce basin. Hence, this discovery enables us to close a major chronological gap in the early prehistory of Iberia. According to the information in this paper and the available data from these other sites, we propose that Mediterranean Western Europe was repeatedly and perhaps continuously occupied during the late Matuyama chron. During the early Pleistocene, hominins moved into new environments outside of Africa to the Euroasian continent in one or several migratory waves (1). By developing strategies and technologies to adapt to new environments, hominins succeeded in the next several hundreds of millennia in occupying diverse habitats from eastern to western Eurasia. The pace and causes of this early colonization are still the source of intense scientific debate (2–6). According to some authorities, the first human colonization of Europe would have been episodic or intermittent, at least until the early Middle Pleistocene, and of little demographic importance (7). However, there is increasingly solid data from Spain (8–13) that clearly indicate that Europe was occupied for the first time over a million years ago, and which thus supports the “Mature Europe” hypothesis (14). In addition, paleoanthropological interpretations of the first hominins’ morphotypes suggest that there is sufficient evidence for biological continuity within the Eurasian fossil record (8, 15, 16). Vallparadís is a recently discovered Lower Pleistocene site in the Mediterranean Iberian Peninsula, which provides sound information concerning both the ecological adaptation and the lithic technology of the hominins, and which suggests that this region has been continually settled for at least 1 million years.

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hal-03226885 , version 1 (15-05-2021)

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K. Martinez, J. Garcia, E. Carbonell, J. Agusti, J.-J. Bahain, et al.. A new Lower Pleistocene archeological site in Europe (Vallparadis, Barcelona, Spain). Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2010, 107 (13), pp.5762-5767. ⟨10.1073/pnas.0913856107⟩. ⟨hal-03226885⟩
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