La Cotte by St Brelade
La Cotte von St Brelade is a Neanderthal site near the hamlet of Quaisne, south of St Brelade , on the coast of the Channel Island of Jersey . Cotte means cave in the local dialect . The cave is also known as Le Creux ès Faïes ( German Cave of the Fairies ).
The Neanderthals lived there between 250,000 and 47,000 BC. It was the oldest occupation of today's Channel Islands by a human species and probably also one of the last Neanderthal sites in northwestern Europe. At that time, Jersey was still part of Normandy , with sea level around 100 m lower than it is today . After the last ice age the sea rose and separated first Guernsey and then Jersey from the continent. The cave was first scientifically explored in 1904. During the long period of time that the artifacts of La Cotte represented, there were significant cultural changes among the users of the site. The oldest, between 240,000 and 200,000 BC Stone tools dated to BC are typical of early Paleolithic sites. From 200,000 BC New processes for the manufacture of stone tools are recognizable, whereby Levallois techniques are increasingly used and the consumption of raw materials becomes more efficient, as tools are reground and reused. At around 180,000 BC Piles of bones made up of selected mammoth and woolly rhinoceros bones were dated . These innovations mark a transition phase between the Middle and Old Paleolithic subsistence strategies .
Robert R. Marett (1866–1943) collected hominid teeth and remains of Neanderthals from 1910 to 1914 at La Cotte and published the results in 1916. The teeth were re-dated in 2013 and based on this analysis were between 100,000 and 47,000 years old. In 1911 Arthur Smith Woodward (1864–1944), who was involved in the archaeological discovery of the Piltdown Man at the time, which later became notorious as a joke, was asked to inspect the results. He used La Cotte's results to support an early dating of his Piltdown material. The excavations at Cambridge University under the direction of Charles McBurney (1914-1979) in the 1960s and 1970s yielded remains of Pleistocene mammals. Katharine Scott published a controversial theory about Neanderthal hunting methods in La Cotte in 1980. In 2010, La Cotte was re-examined by a multidisciplinary team. These excavations determined the age of the deposits to be less than 47,000 years
See also
- Le Creux ès Faïes (Guernsey)
literature
- Beccy Scott, Martin Bates, Richard Bates, Chantal Conneller: A new view from La Cotte de St Brelade, Antiquity Publications Ltd. Jersey 2015
Web links
Coordinates: 49 ° 10 ′ 31.8 " N , 2 ° 11 ′ 17.6" W.