Grotto de Fontechevade

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Grotto de Fontechevade

Entrance to the cave

Entrance to the cave
Location: Charente department , France
Height : 120  m
Geographic
location: 		45 ° 40 '42 "  N , 0 ° 28' 44"  E Coordinates: 45 ° 40 '42 "  N , 0 ° 28' 44"  E
Grotte de Fontéchevade (Charente)
Grotto de Fontechevade
Geology: Jurassic Limestone
Discovery: before 1870
Overall length: 30 meters

The Grotte de Fontéchevade is a prehistoric cave of the Middle Paleolithic ( Charente department in the Nouvelle-Aquitaine region ) in the municipality of Montbron .

etymology

The cave ( French la grotte ) is named after the small brook Ruisseau de Fontéchevade or after the hamlet of the same name Fontéchevade located on it . The Ruisseau de Fontéchevade is a right tributary of the Tardoire .

geography

The cave is located 27 kilometers east of Angoulême and 2 kilometers northwest of Montbron on the border with the municipality of Orgedeuil . It is only 5.5 kilometers to the border of the Dordogne department in the southeast (municipality of Varaignes ) and 12.5 kilometers to the western border of the Haute Vienne department (municipality of Maisonnais-sur-Tardoire ).

description

The cave, which runs in a north-south direction, has the shape of a 6 to 7 meter wide and 30 meter long tunnel. At the far end of the cave is a chimney that opens to the plateau-like surface. The entrance is at 120 meters above sea level in a small forest immediately south of the hamlet of Fontéchevade on the left side of the Ruisseau de Fontéchevade valley . The stream rises a little further to the northeast at a source. The stream flows within its lower terrace, an older elevated terrace is 6 to 7 meters higher. The entrance to the actual main cave is a few meters above the high terrace. However, there is a second cave entrance on the same level as the high terrace.

The Grotte de Fontéchevade can be reached via the D 6 departmental road.

geology

The cave was formed in flat-lying carbonate sediments of the Aquitaine Basin , which line the river valley of the Tardoire on both sides. Due to the extensive recrystallization of the rock - a sandy dolomite - it is difficult to make a clear stratigraphic assignment, but it is likely to be either Lias or Lower Bajocian ( Dogger ). The mouth of the Ruisseau de Fontéchevade with its two terraces is flanked by a Middle Pleistocene Middle and an Old Pleistocene high terrace of the Tardoire. The actual river valley of the Tardoire is now filled with Holocene alluvium - mainly sands and brick-red clays with pebbles made of quartz, quartzite, granite and limestone fragments.

history

The Grotte de Fontéchevade was first discovered in 1870 by Paire and then by J.-L. Fermond examined. This was followed by Durousseau-Dugontier between 1902 and 1910, Vallade between 1913 and 1914, Saint-Perrier in 1921 and David in 1933. David conducted soundings in the Aurignacien . On September 6, 1933, the cave was inscribed as a Monument historique .

Between 1937 and 1955, Germaine Henri-Martin took over the excavations. In 1947 a human skull was exposed. It was assigned to an early Neanderthal and is therefore likely to be the oldest human find in the Charente.

Between 1994 and 1998, Harold L. Dibble and colleagues subjected the cave to a new excavation campaign. The previous finds stored in museums were also re-examined by them. Their results put the previous conclusions in doubt, in particular they saw only minimal signs of an independent culture of the Tayaciens.

stratigraphy

In 1957, Germaine Henri-Martin was able to create a stratigraphy of the six layers A to E in the cave. The cave floor was covered with a layer of clay. Layer B corresponded to the Aurignacia , layer C to the Moustérien and layer E to the Tayacia . Settlement during the Tayacia dates back to the interglacial between the Riss and Würm glacial periods , or 150,000 years before today. Modern studies have now produced eight layers.

Human presence

Germaine Henri-Martin was able to uncover fragments of a frontal bone and a parietal bone assigned to a Homo I in 1947 . In Homo II , a part of a relatively thick skull was still present, from which the frontal bone and parts of the right and left parietal bones hung. It was apparently an elderly early Anderthal man because the sutures were fused together. At that time, only one comparable find was known in France. This came from the Grotte de l'Hyène at the Arcy-sur-Cure site in the Yonne department .

However, Chase and colleagues (2007) dated Homo I and II to 39,000 to 33,000 years ago (protoaurignacia), which corresponds to the oxygen isotope stage OIS 3 - and not the last interglacial.

Other human remains were later discovered, such as the fifth metatarsal bone on the left, which was assigned to the Moustérien in 1948 , as well as four teeth and a phalanx from the Aurignacia or younger.

Durousseau-Dugontier had also found remains of Homo sapiens - the parietal bone of a young man, the remains of a child's lower jaw and a fragment of a spoke . All finds were from the Aurignacia.

In the Bronze Age the cave was used as a collective burial site.

Fauna encountered

Skull of Stephanorhinus kirckbergensis

The fauna found in the cave consisted of horses (including Equus aff. Germanicus and a European wild ass Equus hydruntinus ), large cattle (cattle and bison), deer ( Cervus elaphus ), deer , reindeer ( Rangifer tarandus ), rodents (European hamsters, Hares, marmots, bank voles, ground squirrels), wild boars ( Sus scrofa ), big cats ( cave lion Panthera spelaea ), foxes ( arctic fox Alopex lagopus and red fox Vulpes vulpes ), bears ( Ursus spelaeus ), dogs ( wolf Canis lupus and red dog Cuon alpinus ) Hyenas . Bird bones were also present, belonging to snow bunting ( Plectrophenax nivalis ) and alpine brown cellar ( Prunella collaris ). The deep layer from the Tayacien contained the remains of a tortoise, a forest rhinoceros ( Stephanorhinus kirckbergensis ) and a Clacton fallow deer ( Dama dama clactoniana ). In the micro-fauna were found steppe lemming ( Lagurus lagurus ) Alpine marmot ( Marmota marmota ) and Microtus ratticeps . All in all, the fauna found indicates a pre-worm age of the Tayacia. Note: this contradicts the new dating by Chase and colleagues.

The fauna includes mostly inhabitants of a taiga . However, there are also a few savanna inhabitants (for example hyenas), and the wood rhinoceros even refers to warm temperate rainforest. These considerable differences in the faunistic composition can best be explained by strong and very rapid climatic fluctuations. However, they are possibly also taphonomically conditioned, as the cave sediments were only partly formed in situ, but were mainly washed in via the rear chimney.

Tools and artifacts

The Grotte de Fontéchevade was inhabited from the Middle Paleolithic. She provided the following tools and artifacts:

Périgordia

Items left by people during the Périgordian included numerous burins, gravette points and a fragment of a Font Robert point.

Aurignacia

The Aurignacien can be recognized by scrapers, burins, blades and bone spear points with a split shaft.

Moustérien

The Moustérien is made up of stone artifacts such as points and hand axes.

Tayacias

The Tayacien by Fontéchévade, which coincided with the Acheuléen , includes scrapers, denticulés, choppers or massive scratches, but no hand axes.

See also

literature

  • PG Chase, A. Debénath, HL Dibble, SP McPherron, HP Schwarcz, TW Stafford and J.-F. Tournepiche: New dates for the Fontéchevade (Charente, France) Homo remains . In: Journal of Human Evolution . tape 52 , 2007, p. 217-221 .
  • A. Debénath: Apports récents à la connaissance du Paléolithique moyen du Sud-ouest de la France: les examples de La Quina et Fontéchevade . Ed .: Z. Mester and A. Ringer, À la recherche de l'homme préhistorique. Volume commémoratif de Miklos Gabori and Veronika Gabori-Csank. ERAUL 95, Liège 2000, p. 257-263 .
  • Harold L. Dibble , SJP McPherron, P. Chase, WR Farrand, and A. Debénath: Taphonomy and the concept of Paleolithic Cultures: The Case of the Tayacian from Fontéchevade . In: PaleoAnthropology . 2006, p. 1-21 .
  • V. Dujardin and S. Tymula: Relecture chronologique de sites paléolithiques et épipaléolithiques anciennement fouillés en Poitou-Charentes . In: Le temps, Actes du 129e Congrès des Travaux historiques et scientifiques, Bulletin et Mémoires de la Société préhistorique française . t. 102, nº 4. Besançon 2005, p. 771-788 .
  • Germaine Henri-Martin: La Grotte de Fontéchevade: historique, fouilles, stratigraphy, archeology . vol. 1 and 2. Masson, coll. "Archives de l'Institut de paleontologie humaine", 1957, p. 288 .
  • Germaine Henri-Martin: La Grotte de Fontéchevade . In: Bulletin de l'association française pour l'étude du Quaternaire . vol. 2, nos 3-4, 1965, pp. 211 .
  • C. Paletta: Contribution à l'étude de l'évolution des comportements de subsistance des hommes du Moustérien au Solutréen in the Poitou-Charentes region (France) . In: Antiquités nationales . tape 37 , 2005, pp. 23-41 .
  • Jean Piveteau: La Paléontologie humaine en Charente . In: Bulletin de l'Association pour l'étude du Quaternaire . vol. 2, nos 3-4, 1965.
  • G. Le Pochat et al .: Montbron . In: Carte géologique de la France at 1/50 000 . BRGM, 1986.
  • Erik Trinkaus : A New Reconsideration of the Fontechevade fossils . In: American Journal of Physical Anthropology . tape 39 , 1973, p. 25-35 .

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ J.-L. Fermond: La Charente préhistorique: vallée de la Tardoire et du Bandiat . In: Bulletin de la société de geographie de Rochefort pour l'année 1894 . Rochefort 1894, p. 253-271 .
  2. ^ P. David: Communication sur les travaux effectués à Fontéchevade . In: Bulletins et Mémoires de la Société archéologique et historique de la Charente . Angoulême 1933, p. LXXXIV-LXXXVI .
  3. ↑ André Debénath: Néandertaliens et Cro-Magnons, les temps glaciaires dans le bassin de la Charente . Le Croît Vif, Saintes 2006, ISBN 2-916104-00-3 , p. 356 .
  4. ↑ A. Debénath and JF Tournepiche: Neandertal en Poitou-Charentes . Association régionales des musées en Poitou-Charentes, 1992, ISBN 978-2-905221-14-8 , pp. 130 .
  5. ↑ HL Dibble, SJP McPherron, P. Chase, WR Farrand and A. Debénath: Taphonomy and the concept of Paleolithic Cultures: The Case of the Tayacian from Fontéchevade . In: PaleoAnthropology . 2006, p. 1-21 .
  6. ^ André Leroi-Gourhan: Stratigraphie et découvertes récentes dans les grottes d'Arcy-sur-Cure (Yonne) . In: Revue de geographie de Lyon . vol. 27, no 4, 1952, p. 425-433 .
  7. ↑ PG Chase, A. Debénath, HL Dibble, SP McPherron, HP Schwarcz, TW Stafford and J.-F. Tournepiche: New dates for the Fontéchevade (Charente, France) Homo remains . In: Journal of Human Evolution . tape 52 , 2007, p. 217-221 .
  8. ↑ J.-L. Home: Les restes humains . In: R. Joussaume et al., Sépulture collective de l'Âge du Bronze de la grotte de Fontéchevade (ed.): Bulletins et Mémoires de la Société d'Anthropologie de Paris . XIIIe série, t. II, 1975, p. 61-86 .
  9. ^ Germaine Henri-Martin: Recherches préhistoriques dans la vallée de Fontéchevade (Charente) . In: Bulletin de la Société préhistorique pour l'étude du quaternaire . vol. 36, no 4, 1939, p. 196-199 .
  10. ↑ Jean Chaline: Problems of posés par la découverte du Lemming des steppes dans la couche Tayaciene de la grotte de Fontéchevade . In: Bulletin de l'Association française pour l'étude du quaternaire . vol. 2, nos 3-4, 1965, pp. 218 .
  11. ^ Germaine Henri-Martin: Note préliminaire sur un niveau Tayacien . In: Bulletin de la Société préhistorique Française . vol. 43, nos 5-6, 1946, pp. 179-182 .

Web links

Commons : Grotte de Fontéchevade  - Collection of images, videos and audio files