Intervenant : Paul Albers (Naturalis Biodiversity Center, Leiden)
Résumé :
Firsthand accounts and contemporaneous field photographs of Eugène Dubois’ Pithecanthropus erectus (now Homo erectus) excavation site in Java, Indonesia give us insights about the Homo erectus paleogeography. Geological data about the stratigraphy that were not reported at the time turned out to be present in the archives and help us understand how these hominids became buried at Trinil amongst thousand of bones of animals. These data are still relevant today to better understand the context of the fossils which has been disputed ever since its first publication in 1894. We can show that given this paleogeographic context in Trinil, a catastrophic mortality of ungulates in a population aggregating along the floodplain of a perennial paleo-river must have taken place, followed by lahar-flood deposition of gravel-size lithic and biotic materials.
Lien vers l'article en ligne : https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2022.03.15.484451v1
