14C dating of early upper palaeolithic human and faunal remains from Mladeč

Abstract

The question of the age of the famous fossil human remains from the Mladeč Caves is of considerable importance for debates concerning our understanding of biological and cultural processes at the beginning of the Upper Paleolithic in Europe. The first systematic test excavations in the cave of Mladeč, Middle Moravia, Czech Republic, were conducted in 1881 and 1882 by Josef Szombathy, collaborator of the Naturhistorisches Museum Wien (Szombathy 1882; 1925). Initial findings included human and animal skeletal remains, among them human cranial and post-cranial elements of at least five individuals. Judging from the degree of bone fossilization, as well as animal bones in a similar state of preservation, Szombathy assumed that the entire material was of pleistocene origin. Though initially challenged, this assumption has subsequently been corroborated by the artifacts discovered in 1882 (Hochstetter, 1883; Maška, 1886, 55), which Bayer (1922) and other scholars eventually attributed to the early Upper Paleolithic, i.e., Aurignacian culture (Oliva, 1993; Svoboda, 2000). What remained problematic to the entire ensemble was the lack of precise documentation on these finds and of records on the sequence of sedimentary deposits and exact coordinates of the artifacts and associated fossils. In spite of the difficulties arising from incomplete or insufficient documentation, the ensemble of these finds has played - and still plays - an important and essential role to discussions concerning the transition period when both Neandertals and early modern humans inhabited Europe. The skeletal remains are widely accepted as those of early modern humans since the analysis of Szombathy (1925). However, there is an ongoing discussion as to whether they exhibit distinctive archaic features, indicative of some degree of regional Neandertal ancestry, or are morphologically solely aligned with recent humans and therefore document only a dispersial of modern humans into Europe. The purportedly archaic (or Neandertal) features include a number of qualitative characteristics, such as the sagittal cranial profile and robust supraorbital regions in the Mladeč 5 and 6 males, distinctive occipital bunning in the subadult individual Mladeč 3 as well as Mladeč 5 and 6, large palatal and dental dimensions of Mladeč 8, large crowns of the Mladeč 9a, 10 and 51 canines, and articular hyperthrophy of some of the postcrania. Moreover, although they are robust compared to recent females, the Mladeč 1 and 2 crania exhibit a few of these features (Jelínek, 1983; Frayer, 1986; 1992; Wolpoff et al., 2001; Trinkaus et al., this volume, Wild et al., 2005). This issue is associated with the still unknown mode of emergence of early modern humans in Europe and the fate of the Neandertals. A central point in the entire debate is the age of the Mladeč remains; the question is whether they are indeed of early Upper Paleolithic age and therefore originate from a time period which overlaps with the youngest Neandertals in Europe known so far (Smith et al., 1999; Hublin et al., 1996). Moreover, Mladeč may also contribute significantly to the actual discussion of the development and spreading of Upper Palaeolithic cultural traits. It is beyond a doubt that the artifacts discovered on this site can be attributed to Aurignacian technology. A traditional concept focussed on the association between early modern humans as manufacturer of the Aurignacian artifacts, but this assumption has been challenged according to recently obtained 14C dates: The AMS dating of a Lottorina shell associated with the Cro-Magnon human remains discovered 1868 near les Eyzies-de-Tayac, Dordogne, and routinely attributed to the Aurignacian culture, could demonstrate that they date to 28 14C kyr BP and herewith to the early Gravettian (Henry-Gambier, 2002). Direct 14C dating of human fossils from the southwestern Germany site Stetten (Vogelherd cave) showed that these remains originated from the Neolithic (between 3,900 and 5,000 14C yr BP, Conard et al., 2004). Other purportedly Aurignacian-age modern humans, e.g. from Velika Pécina (Smith et al., 1999), Hahnöfersand (Terberger et al., 2001), Koněprusy (Svoboda, 2000) and La Rochette (Orschiedt, 2002), also turned out younger than initially believed. For the few direct 14C dated human finds with definite early Upper Paleolithic age, such as Peştera cu Oase (Romania, ∼35 14C kyr BP, Trinkaus et al., 2003), Kent's Cavern (U.K., ∼31 14C kyr BP, Stringer, 1990), Peştera Muierii (Romania, ∼30 14C kyr BP, Pǎunescu, 2001) and Peştera Cioclovina (Romania, ∼29 14C kyr BP, Pǎunescu, 2001), a lack of archaeological objects at the sites prevents us from proving that early modern humans were the manufacturers of Aurignacian culture. At the Mladeč site both, human remains and archaeological objects with typical characteristics of the Aurignacian were found. Though not well documented in the excavation protocols from the end of the 19th century an association between the human finds and the cultural remains can be assumed (Szombathy, 1925; Bayer, 1922; Oliva, 1993; Svoboda, 2000). Therefore the finds from the Mladeč Cave gained not only an important role in debates concerning our understanding of biological processes at the transitional period of Middle to Upper Paleolithic but also for the discussion of who were the founders of the Aurignacian culture (e.g., Mellars, 2004). © 2006 Springer-Verlag/Wien. All rights are reserved.