Combe Capelle

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Homo sapiens from Combe Capelle

Combe Capelle ( Eng .: mountain chapel ) is a paleolithic and epipalaeolithic site in the Couze Valley , near the town of Montferrand-du-Périgord and about 44 kilometers from Périgueux , the capital of the Dordogne department . Four Stone Age sites are known today in the Combe Capelle area: Roc de Combe-Capelle , Haut de Combe-Capelle (also known as " Abri Peyrony "), the Plateau de Ruffet and Combe-Capelle Bas .

The following is a description of the Roc de Combe-Capelle site , which became famous for the burial of a supposed Cro-Magnon man found in 1909 . In 2011 radiocarbon dating showed that the burial is much younger than expected and dates from the Holocene Mesolithic .

Find history

Michel-Antoine Landesque discovered the Combe Capelle site in 1885. The art dealer and prehistoric researcher Otto Hauser carried out excavations on the slopes of the river valley (in the abri " Roc de Combe Capelle ") from 1909 . He had leased the area especially for this. His excavation team uncovered layers from four archaeological cultures in the area under the rock roof. From top to bottom they belonged to the Solutréen (layer I), the "upper Aurignacia " (layer II, in today's terminology Gravettia ), the middle (layer III) and lower Aurignacia (layer IV). The lower Aurignacia layer is also referred to by Hauser as Châtelperronien , then synonymous with Aurignacien ancien . According to Hauser, this layer was 30 cm thick and separated from layer III by a 15 cm thick, archaeologically sterile layer. In the lying area of ​​layer IV there were finds of the Moustérien (layer M), below is the rock in the vicinity.

On August 26, 1909, the excavation workers in the Aurignacien layer IV found the stool grave of a man around 40 to 50 years old. The next day, Hauser inspected the funeral for the first time. The find was salvaged on September 11, 1909 by Otto Hauser and the anthropologist Hermann Klaatsch, who taught in Breslau . The burial is a long-headed modern human (Homo sapiens) with an inclined forehead and elongated face. He is shorter than the typical Cro-Magnon human . Similarities were seen to the East Central European "Brünnrasse". The grave faced north-south, with the head in the north and the skull with an inclination of 50 ° to the west. In the hip area, the skeleton lay directly on the adjacent rock.

Lost property

Hauser sold the "Man from Combe Capelle" together with the skeleton of a young Neanderthal man found in Le Moustier in 1908 to the Royal Museum of Ethnology in Berlin. The museum building was destroyed in the Second World War, and the skeleton charred heavily, as did the skeleton of Le Moustier, which had also been removed.

In the post-war period, Combe Capelle's skull was considered lost and was only rediscovered in fragmented form on December 27, 2001 during inventory work. It was fire rubble from the Gropiusbau , in which the associated flint artifacts from the burial of Combe Capelle were suspected. The upper and lower jaws were also found on January 8, 2002 in an incorrectly labeled collection box. The reconstructed skull has been exhibited in the Berlin Museum of Prehistory and Early History in Charlottenburg Palace since 2003 and has been part of the permanent exhibition in the Neues Museum since 2009 .

Dating and controversy surrounding the finding

Despite the anthropologically detailed investigation after the rediscovery of the skull, the question of the absolute age of the burial remained open for a long time. Because the skull and skeleton were boiled in bone glue for a long time after recovery , radiocarbon dating of a skull fragment was unsuccessful and further dating of the bones was considered hopeless. It was not until 2009 that a molar was removed from the Leibniz Laboratory in Kiel , which had to be pulverized to extract the collagen . Since the tooth enamel offers quite good protection against the bone glue treatment, the likelihood here was the greatest of preserving undamaged collagen. The result of the AMS direct dating was announced in February 2011 at a press conference and shortly afterwards scientifically published. Three raw dates of around 8550 BP correspond to a calibrated age of around 7600-7700 BC. It is therefore undoubtedly a man of the Epipalaeolithic , i.e. the post-ice age .

This proves that the grave pit for the burial of the man from Combe Capelle was intrusively sunk into the lower strata without this being recognized by the excavation team in 1909. Otto Hauser himself had reported in his notes a few days before the burial was found of a local disappearance of layers II and III, which Gisela Asmus pointed out in 1964 in a critical revision of the findings. After finding the grave, Hauser had emphasized that an undisturbed, 15 cm thick sterile layer would exist between the Chatelperron layer IV and the younger Aurignac layer III, which Asmus viewed as questionable. Hauser also described the hanging layer I from the Solutréen as continuously undisturbed, which would have formed the term ante quem for the deepening of the grave pit. As the direct dating of the tooth shows, this stratigraphic observation was also inaccurate, because with an undisturbed Solutréen layer the burial should have been at least the same age.

According to the article by G. Asmus and especially after the new dating of the graves from the Abri Cro-Magnon into Gravettia , many archaeologists favored Gravettia as the most likely dating for Combe Capelle, for which the addition of the chain of snail shells would be extremely typical. In addition to the Abri Cro-Magnon , snail jewelery was also found in the Austrian Gravettia sites of Langenlois and Grub- Kranawetberg or in the Brno I grave. Klaatsch and Hauser have already pointed out the latter parallel. Ornamental snails are also found in the Epipalaeolithic in southern France and in the Mesolithic in Central Europe.

On the question of grave goods

The numerous grave goods include a necklace made of pierced houses of the sea snail Littorina littorea and more than ten snail shells of the species Helix nemoralis (land snail) and Nassa reticulata (also sea snail). As there is no dating of the snail shells, it is unclear whether the chain belongs to the Epipalaeolithic burial or not. In situational photos during the excavation, the snails are grouped around the buried person's head, which suggests that they are classified as authentic grave goods. The custom of adding numerous ornamental snails is also documented, for example, in the skull burials of about the same age in the Bavarian Ofnet cave .

According to Hauser, the following were still handed down from Layer IV (Lower Aurignacia): 600 remains of fauna, 187 "good" artifacts ( probably meant: devices ) and approx. 1000 splinters ( probably meant: cuts and splits ). As has been clarified since the dating, these Aurignacia artefacts, originally regarded as grave goods , are not connected with the burial, but were in random proximity when the grave pit was deepened. Such artefacts made of flint from the lower layer complex (IV and M) are, for example, a waisted blade scraper and a burin, which ended up in the Berlin Museum with the burial. Hauser had mentioned that a considerable number of true Moustier types would have been found in Layer IV. Since the Moustérien layer (layer M) lay directly on the adjacent rock, the mixture can be both a palimpsest horizon and an inventory of Moustérien and Aurignac types, as is the case in Châtelperronien . Most recent research, however, assumes a disruption of the context of the findings.

literature

  • Bernd Herrmann : The Combe Capelle skeleton . In: Excavations in Berlin 3, 1972, ISSN  0341-8499 , pp. 7-69
  • Denis Peyrony: Combe-Capelle (1) . In: Bulletin de la Société Préhistorique Française 40, 1943, ISSN  0037-9514 , pp. 243-257
  • Denis Peyrony: Le gisement du roc de Combe Capelle (Commune de Saint-Avit-Sénieur, Dordogne) . In: Bulletin Société historique Périgord 70, 1943, ISSN  1141-135X , pp. 156-173, (Périgueux)
  • Pierre Honoré: The Book of the Paleolithic or the dispute over the ancestors . Econ-Verlag, Düsseldorf et al. 1967, p. 288

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Hélène Valladas et al .: TL dates for the Middle Paleolithic site of Combe-Capelle Bas, France. Journal of Archaeological Science Volume 30, Issue 11, November 2003, pp. 1443-1450 doi : 10.1016 / S0305-4403 (03) 00039-6
  2. ↑ a b c d e f Hermann Klaatsch, Otto Hauser: Homo Aurignaciensis Hauseri - A paleolithic skeleton find from the lower Aurignacia of the Combe Capelle station near Montferrand (Périgord) . Prehistoric Journal I. Vol. 3/4, 1910, pp. 273–338
  3. ↑ Otto Hauser: Man 100,000 years ago. Brockhaus, Leipzig 1917, pp. 36–55
  4. ↑ M.-A. Landesque: Excursion à la station préhistorique de Combe Capelle . Bull. Soc. Géol. de France, 3, 1888
  5. ↑ Klaatsch & Hauser, p. 297
  6. ↑ Hoffmann and Wegner (2003), pp. 126–127
  7. ↑ a b The grave of Combe Capelle in France, which has been dated 30,000 years ago, is thousands of years younger (press release: Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, General Directorate, PDF download)
  8. ↑ Christoph Seidler: Researchers disenchant the Stone Age man (Spiegel online February 9, 2011, accessed on February 9, 2011)
  9. ↑ a b Almut Hoffmann et al .: The Homo aurignaciensis hauseri from Combe-Capelle - A Mesolithic burial. Journal of Human Evolution 61 (2), 2011, pp. 211-214 doi : 10.1016 / j.jhevol.2011.03.001
  10. ↑ for calibration cf.
  11. ↑ a b Gisela Asmus: Critical remarks and points of view on the Upper Palaeolithic burial of Combe Capelle Périgord ( Memento of the original of December 13, 2015 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / quaternary-science.publiss.net archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. . In: Eiszeitalter und Gegenwart 15, 1964, ISSN  0424-7116 , doi : 10.3285 / eg.15.1.13 , pp. 181–186
  12. ↑ Klaatsch & Hauser, pp. 297–299
  13. ↑ Strauch, F .: Gyraulus trochiformis as an ornamental snail from the Mesolithic cultural layers of southern Germany. - In: W. Taute (ed.): The Mesolithic in Southern Germany. Part 2. Scientific investigations - Tübingen Monogr. Urgesch., 5 (2), 1978, pp. 161-162
  14. ↑ Almut Hoffmann: Le Moustier and Combe Capelle: The Palaeolithic finds of the Swiss archaeologist Otto Hauser. Museum of Prehistory and Early History, Berlin 2003, ISBN 3-88609-482-0 . Museum of Prehistory and Early History, National Museums in Berlin: Inventory catalog Volume 9, p. 38
  15. ↑ Klaatsch & Hauser, pp. 279–283
  16. ↑ Almut Hoffmann, Dietrich Wegner: Homo Aurignaciensis Hauseri - A paleolithic skeleton find from the lower Aurignacia of the Combe Capelle station near Montferrand / Périgord . Acta Praehistorica et Archaeologica Vol. 35, 2003 ISSN  0341-1184 , pp. 113-137
  17. ↑ Hoffmann and Wegner (2003), p. 126

Coordinates: 44 ° 45 ′ 10 ″  N , 0 ° 50 ′ 55 ″  E