Combe-Capelle is a Paleolithic and Epipaleolithic site situated in the Couze valley in the Périgord region of Southern France. Henri-Marc Ami carried out excavations in the area from the late 1920s until his death in 1931.

The fossil Homo sapiens from Combe Capelle with ornaments, 7,600 BC. Museum für Völkerkunde, Berlin

The famous Homo sapiens fossil from Combe-Capelle, discovered in 1909 was sold to the Museum für Völkerkunde, Berlin, in 1910. It was for a long time considered to be 30,000 years old, an Upper Paleolithic Cro-Magnon man and one of the oldest finds of modern humans in Europe, formerly classified as Homo aurignaciensis hauseri.[1] This was revised in a 2011 study, which dated collagen from a tooth of the skull in Berlin with accelerator mass spectrometry. The fossil was found to date to the early Holocene (Mesolithic Europe), at 9,500 years old.[2]

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References edit

  1. ^ Robert Alexander Stewart, Macalister, A text-book of European archaeology (1921), p. 359. Verhandlung der geologischen Reichsanstalt (1909), p. 302. Georg Wilke, "Die neue Skelettfund des Homo auri-gnaciensis Hauseri" (Mannus 1 [1909], p. 252); G. Kossinna. "Zum Homo aurignaciensis" (Mannus 2 [1910], p. 169).
  2. ^ "7601–7547 cal BC, 95.4%" Almut Hoffmann et al.: The Homo aurignaciensis hauseri from Combe-Capelle - A Mesolithic burial. Journal of Human Evolution 61(2), 2011, S. 211–214 doi:10.1016/j.jhevol.2011.03.001.

44°45′10″N 00°50′55″E / 44.75278°N 0.84861°E / 44.75278; 0.84861