Sex estimation of the adult Neandertal Regourdou 1 (Montignac, France): Implications for sexing human fossil remains.

Sex is a biological trait fundamental to the study of hominin fossils. Among the many questions that can be addressed are those related to taxonomy, biological variability, sexual dimorphism, paleoobstetrics, funerary selection, and paleodemography. While new methodologies such as paleogenomics or paleoproteomics can be used to determine sex, they have not been systematically applied to Pleistocene human remains due to their destructive nature.

Palaeogenomics of Upper Palaeolithic to Neolithic European hunter-gatherers.

Modern humans have populated Europe for more than 45,000 years. Our knowledge of the genetic relatedness and structure of ancient hunter-gatherers is however limited, owing to the scarceness and poor molecular preservation of human remains from that period. Here we analyse 356 ancient hunter-gatherer genomes, including new genomic data for 116 individuals from 14 countries in western and central Eurasia, spanning between 35,000 and 5,000 years ago.

Reconstructing Late Pleistocene paleoclimate at the scale of human behavior: an example from the Neandertal occupation of La Ferrassie (France).

Exploring the role of changing climates in human evolution is currently impeded by a scarcity of climatic information at the same temporal scale as the human behaviors documented in archaeological sites. This is mainly caused by high uncertainties in the chronometric dates used to correlate long-term climatic records with archaeological deposits. One solution is to generate climatic data directly from archaeological materials representing human behavior.

Isotopic calcium biogeochemistry of MIS 5 fossil vertebrate bones: application to the study of the dietary reconstruction of Regourdou 1 Neandertal fossil.

The calcium isotopic composition (δCa) of bone and tooth enamel can be used for dietary reconstructions of extant and extinct mammals. In natural conditions, the δCa value of bone and teeth varies according to dietary intake with a constant isotopic offset of about -0.6‰.