Tautavel Man is a proposed subspecies of Homo erectus, the type specimen being 450,000-year-old fossil remains discovered in the Arago Cave in Tautavel, France. Excavations began in 1964, with the first notable discovery occurring in 1969.
History of excavations
The first person to find objects at the location did so during 1828. These were animal bones considered antediluvian by Marcel de Serres, a professional geologist at the University of Montpellier. The Proto-Mousterian Industry tools found by Jean Abélanet during 1963, initiated the beginning of the Lumley led excavations of 1964.
Discovery and representative fossils
The skeletal remains of two individual hominins have been found in the cave: a female older than 40, and a male aged no more than 20. Recovered stone tools originate from within a radius of the cave, while animal bones suggest the inhabitants could travel up to for food. All fossils recovered from Arago were found by Henry and Marie-Antoinette de Lumley and are now located at the Institute for Human Palaeontology in Paris. Arago II is a nearly complete mandible with six teeth from a 40–55 years old female. Arago XXI is a deformed cranial fragment featuring the most complete pre-Neanderthal face accompanied by a frontal and a sphenoid bone. Arago XLVII is a right parietal bone, the sutures of which fits perfectly with Arago XXI. The two latter have an estimated developmental age of twenty, while a uranium series dating produced a fossil age of c.400,000 years The male skull has a flat and receding forehead with well-developed supraorbital ridges and a large face with rectangular eye sockets. The cranial cavity had a volume of. The rest of the skeleton has been reconstructed from 75 fossil remains and casts from fossils found at other sites; an interpretation suggesting in a sturdier skeleton than that of modern humans and a height of. Through the thousands of years from the time that Arago XXI died, changes occurred to the structure of the bone known as "taphonomic transformations", modifying the shape of skull. These had caused parts of the bone to become slightly bent, including the front of the skull to lose symmetry. Three-dimensional imaging using computers allowed a morphometric analysis of the skull and this was used to compare with skull dimensions of Homo sapiens sapiens and also to obtain a computer generated image of the hominins face. Compared to H. erectus in North Africa and China, H. erectus tautavelensis is closer to early H. sapiens and thus form a morphologically distinct group together with other European Middle Pleistocene hominins found in Steinheim, Swanscombe, and Pontnewydd, because they show some of the characteristics of Neanderthals. The oldest indirect evidence of hominins in Europe dates to perhaps and while Arago is certainly younger, the stalagmite floor under the cave deposits has been ambiguously dated to 700,000 years old by electron spin resonance but to 300,000 years old by thermoluminescence. No signs of fire, ash, charcoal, burned stone, or clay is documented in the cave which seems to suggest the art of fire is a recent discovery, though traces at a erectus site in East Africa indicate the opposite.
Arago XXI
Arago XXI is a deformed cranial fragment dated to approximately 450,000 years. The skull was found by H. Lumley and M.A. Lumley in the Arago Cave located at Tautavel France. The hominin was twenty years old as indicated by the state of the fronto-pariental suture, and the gender is thought to be male. Archaeologists were uncertain of the age of the hominin, although finding the morphology comparable to the Petralona skull that is accepted as a Neanderthal of the Upper Pleistocene variate, paleoanthropologists have classified the skull instead as Heidelberg.
Ecology
The people of the cave ate elk, fallow deer, reindeer, musk ox, bison, Hemitragus bonali, argali, chamois and Stephanorhinus kirchbergensis. Bones of Cervus elaphus acoronatus and Cervus elaphoids, two species of deer, Canis etruscus, and Ursus deningeri, were the most found animal remains in reducing order of number of findings by percentage in the interglacial stage, in the glacial stage the most were Equus mosbachensis, and Ovis ammon antiqua,, and additionally remains of Hemitragus bosali.
Arago Cave
Occupied from 600,000 to 400,000 B.P., the cave is of the earliest known from the middlePleistocene to archaeology of the Pyrenees. Scraper and chopper tools found within the cave were of the Tayacian Industry. The current cave dimensions are smaller than those from the time when the hominin inhabited the cave, the current measurements being 30 metres long and between 10 and 15 metres wide. During 2007 the Institut de Paléontologie de Humaine and the Centre Européen Recherche de Pre-historique de Tautavel, both having charge of the site, contacted the ENSG in order to construct a three dimensional model of the cave.
