Direct Dating of Neanderthal Remains from the Site of Vindija Cave and Implications for the Middle to Upper Paleolithic Transition
Direct dating of Neanderthal remains from the site of Vindija Cave and implications for the Middle to Upper Paleolithic transition Thibaut Devièsea,1, Ivor Karavanicb,c, Daniel Comeskeya, Cara Kubiaka, Petra Korlevicd, Mateja Hajdinjakd, Siniša Radovice, Noemi Procopiof, Michael Buckleyf, Svante Pääbod, and Tom Highama aOxford Radiocarbon Accelerator Unit, Research Laboratory for Archaeology and the History of Art, University of Oxford, Oxford OX1 3QY, United Kingdom; bDepartment of Archaeology, Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, University of Zagreb, HR-10000 Zagreb, Croatia; cDepartment of Anthropology, University of Wyoming, Laramie, WY 82071; dDepartment of Evolutionary Genetics, Max-Planck-Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, D-04103 Leipzig, Germany; eInstitute for Quaternary Palaeontology and Geology, Croatian Academy of Sciences and Arts, HR-10000 Zagreb, Croatia; and fManchester Institute of Biotechnology, University of Manchester, Manchester M1 7DN, United Kingdom Edited by Richard G. Klein, Stanford University, Stanford, CA, and approved July 28, 2017 (received for review June 5, 2017) Previous dating of the Vi-207 and Vi-208 Neanderthal remains from to directly dating the remains of late Neanderthals and early Vindija Cave (Croatia) led to the suggestion that Neanderthals modern humans, as well as artifacts recovered from the sites they survived there as recently as 28,000–29,000 B.P. Subsequent dating occupied. It has become clear that there have been major pro- yielded older dates, interpreted as ages of at least ∼32,500 B.P. We blems with dating reliability and accuracy across the Paleolithic have redated these same specimens using an approach based on the in general, with studies highlighting issues with underestimation extraction of the amino acid hydroxyproline, using preparative high- of the ages of different dated samples from previously analyzed performance liquid chromatography (Prep-HPLC).
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