A pedogenically-informed chronostratigraphic model elucidates the geochronology at the type site of the Bohunician technocomplex

Abstract

The Bohunician, a Moravian variant of the broader Initial Upper Palaeolithic (IUP) lithic technocomplex, is thought to have arisen during the transition from the Middle to the Upper Palaeolithic in the ‘contact zone’ between the first anatomically modern humans and local Neanderthals. Attempts to date the Bohunician occupation at the eponymous site of Brno-Bohunice using luminescence and radiocarbon methods have yielded contradictory results. We propose a new perspective of the chronological position and taphonomy of the Bohunician finds based on a revaluation of published radiometric and luminescence data from the Brno-Bohunice site according to an updated radiocarbon calibration curve and recently revised pedostratigraphy. Here, for the first time, we combined contradictionary results of various dating method into one chronostratigraphical model of the site. The Bayesian model considers the discovery that the palaeosol(s) contemporary to most of the artefacts is (are) missing and the actual position was affected by frost-heaving processes. The onset of the Bohunician technocomplex is therefore placed most probably as early as ∼50 ka cal BP (the end of GI 14) and shows that it existed mainly during the interstadials GI 13 and GI 12. Nevertheless, the broad timespan of unmodelled thermoluminescence dates indicates a possible persistence of the last practitioners of Bohunician technology until ∼42 ka cal BP (GI 11), when development of a Cambisol horizon took place. Our model has two possible explanations: The first wave of anatomically modern humans (with or without Neanderthal introgression) arrived in Central Europe before GI 12, or the Bohunician technocomplex is connected with the local Neanderthal population.