GOING BACK IN TIME
After investigations using archive photos and documents, carried out by anthropologist
Diane Laville, to redetermine the placement of the seven Neanderthal skeletons found
there last century, the multi-disciplinary scientific team led by Alain Turq, Harold
Dibble, Dennis Sandgathe, Paul Goldberg and Shannon Mac Pherron, had gathered that
part of the site related to two of the skeletons had probably remained intact. Exploration
in June 2011 was to confirm this hypothesis. The previous year dosimeters had been
positioned in the ground by Norbert Mercier and Guillaume Guérin to measure the
natural ambient radioactivity. So the first task in 2011 was to collect them up.
Estimating the dose received will soon enable researchers to work out the exact
age of the human fossils. For this, at nightfall, quartz particles were taken from
whole blocks of sediment. The principle: since the time they were buried (corresponding
to the time the bodies themselves were interred) these rock particles have accumulated
a large number of gamma rays which, divided by the annual dose recorded by the dosimeter,
will reveal just how many thousands of years they have been belowground. When these
quartz particles are exposed to light the energy they have stored escapes. The procedure
is therefore followed in the dark, in a laboratory, in a place where the radiation
can be monitored. Other dating methodologies are used to compare results and we
shall ultimately be able to ascertain the time in history when the Neanderthal man,
the woman and the five children, found in their resting places, actually lived at
La Ferrassie.
LANDCAPES OF LONG AGO
At the same time the prehistorians are working to determine how the deposits settled
- to form, layer upon layer, the sedimentary strata which, on this particular site,
represent from top to bottom - exactly as our “explorers” had imagined – the great
cultures of our prehistoric past named after the places where they were first observed:
Aurignacian, Châtelperronian, La Ferrassie-type Mousterian and traditional Acheulean
Mousterian. These appellations, their respective ages and their cultural content
are of course central to this series of excavations. The first collections of flint
tools and animal bones unearthed raised questions which will call for more progressive
ways of thinking in the next few years. The study of the fine blades, made by geologist
Paul Goldberg by meticulously dipping compact blocks of sediment into resin, will
at the same time give insight into the exact nature of the soils and their formation
as life on Earth went on. All this will eventually give us a good picture of certain
aspects of life here in the far distant past. By analogy, before dating methodologies,
the small population at La Ferrassie was put into the classic Neanderthal category
(50,000 years). As we approach 2012, we are on the verge of knowing if the groups
of human beings who left some of their dead at La Ferrassie did not in fact live
there well before - and in an environment totally different from the one we imagined.
More to come…
Sophie Cattoire
Translated into English by Valerie Saraben
|
