Dr. Glenn Berger returns to Atapuerca to help date some of the Europes’s oldest remains

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE: June 17, 2009

Collecting samples at one of the mid-late Pleistocene paleo-anthropological karstic-cave sites at Atapuerca, Spain (G. Berger & A. Gonzalez, 2000).

RENO — DRI’s Dr. Glenn Berger is headed to Spain to study one of the world’s most important archeological sites. Berger, using luminescence dating, will measure the time elapsed since the sediment’s last exposure to sunshine.

Supported by the National Science Foundation (NSF), Berger will conduct three weeks of field work in northern Spain with Spanish colleagues at the United Nations Educational Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) World Heritage Archeological Site of Atapuerca, near Burgos. There Berger will gather sediment samples (that enclose fossils) to use luminescence dating techniques to better pinpoint the age of the fossils of human ancestors.

In his laboratory at DRI, Berger will apply several variations of a sediment-dating technique that measures luminescence to be stimulated artificially from unheated mineral grains. In this way, burial ages up to about one million years of the sediments enclosing the fossil and tool finds can be measured. Berger directs the E.L. Cord Geochronology Laboratory that has state-of-the-art technology for luminescence dating.

“For the last one-million-year period, this is the world’s most important site for fossils, tools and faunal finds related to the presence of ancestors to modern humans, yet much of the timing for the deposition of the various finds at the four related sites at Atapuerca is uncertain,” Berger said. “Understanding when human ancestors arrived in Europe and how they evolved thereafter requires knowing the ages of the fossil and stone-tool finds.”

At one of the Atapuerca sites, the oldest skull of a human ancestor having a modern face was found in the 1990s, yet its exact age (known only to be older than about 800,000 years) is still uncertain. Berger and Spanish colleagues will collect sediment samples throughout three of the cave sites at Atapuerca.

“The project will not only attempt to provide a better age for the skull at the Gran Dolina site, but will provide the first numeric ages for stone tools from a relatively new cave site and more precise and accurate ages for the tools discovered from the two other cave sites,” Berger said.

Berger first visited the Spanish sites in 1997 at the request of colleagues in Spain because of his experience with sediment-dating using luminescence. Within the last 2 years, the Spanish government has built in Burgos a museum dedicated to human origins, as well as related new scientific laboratories.