sábado, 4 de agosto de 2012

The Mysterious Affair at Kents Cavern

The twee town of Torquay, on England’s Devon coast, has two major claims to fame: It was the birthplace and longtime home of mystery writer Agatha Christie, and it’s the home of Kents Cavern, one of the United Kingdom’s most important archaeological sites. Last year, researchers reported that an upper jaw found in the cave could be the oldest modern human fossil in Europe. But a new study questions that claim, arguing that the date of the jawbone may never be known with certainty. The controversy has an important bearing on debates about the spread of Homo sapiens out of Africa.

"One bad date can rewrite the entire prehistory of our species in Europe," says Paul Pettitt, an archaeologist at the University of Sheffield in the United Kingdom and co-author of the new study, which is in press at the European Journal of Archaeology. But members of the original team, who published their dating results last year in Nature, have responded sharply to the criticisms. The new study's conclusions, says Thomas Higham, a radiocarbon dating expert at the University of Oxford in the United Kingdom and lead author of the Nature paper, "expose a breathtaking ignorance of the [new] developments in scientific approaches to the past."... news.sciencemag.org

Actualización 10-08-12. Kent's Cavern and the earliest modern Europeans.
For those that enjoy scientific disputes, this week a new one appeared for the Palaeolithic, hinging on the reliability of the date published last year for a diminutive human jaw fragment as the earliest European Homo sapiens. I have to say straight up that I am not entirely independent here, having worked on the site in question, Kent's Cavern (I looked at the Neanderthal artefacts), and with... The Rocks Remain

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salaman.es dijo...

Actualización. Kent's Cavern and the earliest modern Europeans.