Senèze: Life in Central France Around Two Million Years Ago: Paleontology, Geochronology, Stratigraphy and Taphonomy

This volume presents the culmination of a two-decades long multidisciplinary study at Senèze in France, a site located inside an extinct volcanic crater within which a maar lake formed, at whose margins mammals presumably came to drink and died. The fauna from this site has become world-famous, including many partial or complete skeletons of ungulates and carnivores, as well as rare but well-preserved remains of primates and a variety of other mammals. It is considered the reference fauna for the stage of European mammalian evolution known as the Late Villafranchian or MNQ18, thought to date around 2-1.5 million years ago. In 2000, the editors began a multidisciplinary project to apply modern paleontological techniques to the Senèze locality and its fauna (and flora). Five major seasons of fieldwork included stratigraphic study and mapping, sampling for geochronological dating, excavation of mammalian fossils, evaluation of site formation processes and laser-alidadetopography and location of all fossils and samples. The book offers a unified and focused source of the results collected by the international team of researchers who analyzed the data from the site. As this site is comparable in age to the earliest presence of humans in Europe (e.g., Dmanisi, Georgia and sites in southern Spain), but has no sign of modification by human action, it will be an excellent reference for paleoanthropologists seeking ways to distinguish such modifications. The volume will also be of interest to paleontologists, especially those concerned with the evolution of the European fauna and with the taxa studied, as well as with paleoenvironmental reconstruction and biogeography; mammalogists interested in analyses of near-modern taxa; and paleoanthropologists, archaeologists and taphonomists, interested in the methods and to see Senèze as a comparative standard for a site of this age without human intervention.