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Chronology and Faunal Remains of the Khayrgas Cave (Eastern Siberia, Russia)

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  29 June 2016

Yaroslav V Kuzmin*
Affiliation:
Institute of Geology & Mineralogy, Siberian Branch of the Russian Academy of Sciences, Novosibirsk 630090, Russia; also Tomsk State University, Tomsk 634050, Russia.
Pavel A Kosintsev
Affiliation:
Institute of Plant & Animal Ecology, Urals Branch of the Russian Academy of Sciences, Yekaterinburg 620144, Russia.
Aleksandr D Stepanov
Affiliation:
Museum of Archaeology & Ethnography, North-Eastern Federal University, Yakutsk 677000, Russia.
Gennady G Boeskorov
Affiliation:
Diamond and Precious Metals Geology Institute, Siberian Branch of the Russian Academy of Sciences, Yakutsk 677980, Russia.
Richard J Cruz
Affiliation:
AMS Laboratory, University of Arizona, Tucson, AZ 85721-0081, USA.
*
*Corresponding author. Email: kuzmin@fulbrightmail.org.

Abstract

The Khayrgas Cave in Yakutia (eastern Siberia) is one of the most important Upper Paleolithic sites in northern Asia, and has been the subject of extensive 14C dating and study of mammal bones. The upper part of the cave sequence (Layers 2–4) dates to the Holocene (~4100–8200 BP), and the lower part (Layers 5–7) to the Late Pleistocene (~13,100–21,500 BP). In Layers 2–4, only extant animal species are known; ecologically they belong to a forest-type ecosystem. In Layers 5–7, several extinct species were identified, and the environment at that time corresponded to open and semi-open ecosystems. The Khayrgas Cave provides rare but reliable evidence of human occupation in the deep continental region of eastern Siberia at the Last Glacial Maximum, ~20,700–21,500 BP.

Type
Puzzles in Archaeological Chronologies
Copyright
© 2016 by the Arizona Board of Regents on behalf of the University of Arizona 

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Footnotes

Selected Papers from the 2015 Radiocarbon Conference, Dakar, Senegal, 16–20 November 2015

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