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Poster De Conférence Année : 2022

Palaeoecological reconstructions of the Middle to Late Pleistocene occupations in the Southern Caucasus using rodent assemblages

Résumé

Located at the crossroads between Africa, Europe and Asia, Southern Caucasus is a prime location to study H. heidelbergensis, H. neanderthalensis and anatomically modern human occupations. Azokh Cave is an important site for the understanding of human evolution in its archaeological, paleontological, environmental and ecological context. The cave has provided evidence of occupation by hominin from the Middle Pleistocene to Holocene and it is the only well stratified and dated sequence of this period in the region. The main objective of this work, using rodents, is to infer the climatic and environmental conditions during the formation of the site. Small mammals remains come from the archaeological excavation campaigns carried out in Azokh 1 in 2003, 2005, 2014, 2015 and 2018, in particular from: Unit V(uranium series dating indicated an age of ca. 200 ka, racemisation (D/LAsp) indicated an age closer to ca. 300 ka and ESR dating has suggested an age of 293 ± 23 ka), Unit III-IV(no dates are available for this unit) and Unit II(ESR dating indicates an age of 184 ± 13 ka for the bottom of the unit II and 100 ± 7 ka for the top). The small-mammals assemblage is composed by at least 13 taxa: seven arvicoline (Clethrionomys glareolus, Microtus gr. arvalis-socialis, Microtus (Terricola) spp., Arvicola ex. gr. persicus, Chionomys nivalis, Chionomys gud and Ellobius lutescens), two cricetine (Cricetulus migratorius and Mesocricetus brandti), two gerbilline (Meriones gr. persicus- tristrami, Meriones gr. dahli-lybicus), one dipodid (Allactaga cf. williamsi) and one murine species (Apodemus sp.). Unit III-IV do not yield enough material to draw palaeoclimatic inferences (minimum number of individuals < 30). Paleoclimatic conditions, for units V and II, obtained with the Bioclimatic model method, on the basis of the faunal spectrum, assuming that small- and large-mammal species can be ascribed to ten different climates, suggests temperatures and precipitations similar to nowadays, the climate seems to be relatively warm-temperate in both units. Regarding the paleoenvironmental reconstruction, through the habitat weighting method, which is based on the current distribution of each taxon in the habitat(s) where it can be found nowadays, looks an environment mainly composed of desert and steppe habitats. This interpretation differs from large mammals and archaeobotanical data, that indicate a woodland environment while small vertebrates mainly arid environments, such as steppe and desert, this differences could be explained by the origin of the accumulation, because large mammals lives there of in the vicinity of the cave and in the case of small vertebrates this could come from open areas because they were accumulated by birds of prey, that hunt over open areas. Hominin populations from Azokh 1 lived between the end of the Middle Pleistocene and the beginning of the late Pleistocene surrounded by warm- temperate climate conditions with a landscape mainly composed by desert and steppe, also with grassland and forest proportions. No major palaeoenvironmental or palaeoclimatic change between Middle and Late Pleistocene layers was evidenced, indicating favourable conditions throughout the study period.
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Dates et versions

hal-03855002 , version 1 (16-11-2022)

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  • HAL Id : hal-03855002 , version 1

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Iván Rey-Rodríguez, Juan Manuel López-García, Emmanuelle Stoetzel, Christiane C. Denys, Julie Arnaud, et al.. Palaeoecological reconstructions of the Middle to Late Pleistocene occupations in the Southern Caucasus using rodent assemblages. 12th meeting of the European Society for the study of Human Evolution (ESHE), Sep 2022, Tübingen, Germany. . ⟨hal-03855002⟩
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