Replies

I think I see now why these new results were cooked up. Thanks go to Dienekes' anthropology 'blog for this 2004 tidbit, linked off his current page:

Unexpectedly recent dates for human remains from Vogelherd
Dienekes Pontikos
July 07, 2004
A new study in Nature removes the last remaining link between the Upper Paleolithic Aurignacian technologies and modern humans. There is thus currently no evidence for the co-existence of UP humans and Aurignacian technologies at any sites. The authors conclude that while there is still evidence for the existence of modern humans in Europe during Aurignacian times, there is no longer any evidence for the idea that modern humans produced the Aurignacian, suggesting that this could just as easily have been produced by the indigenous Neandertals.

Nature 430, 198 - 201 (08 July 2004)

NICHOLAS J. CONARD et al.

The human skeletal remains from the Vogelherd cave in the Swabian Jura of southwestern Germany are at present seen as the best evidence that modern humans produced the artefacts of the early Aurignacian1. Radiocarbon measurements from all the key fossils from Vogelherd show that these human remains actually date to the late Neolithic, between 3,900 and 5,000 radiocarbon years before present (BP). Although many questions remain unresolved, these results weaken the arguments for the Danube Corridor hypothesis2—that there was an early migration of modern humans into the Upper Danube drainage—and strengthen the view that Neanderthals may have contributed significantly to the development of Upper Palaeolithic cultural traits independent of the arrival of modern humans3, 4.

ArchaeoBlog had the link:

Radiocarbon revision lapses
by John Hawks
Department of Anthropology
University of Wisconsin
Madison
I absolutely love this quote from the Reuters story:
Rather than taking 7,000 years to colonize Europe from Africa, the reinterpreted data shows the process may have taken only 5,000 years, scientist Paul Mellars from Cambridge University said in Thursday's issue of the journal Nature.
Wow. I mean, wow! Talk about your "new discoveries overturning all previous theories"!

...I can't do much better than to quote my own post from last May concerning the Mladec date (31,000 BP)
[quoting Wild et al. 2005]

The Mladec site has significance for both human evolutionary and archaeological issues and the relevance of its remains has increased as a result of the recent dating of the purportedly Aurignacian-age modern human remains from Velika Pecina (Croatia), Hahnofersand (Germany) and Vogelherd (Germany) to the Holocene epoch, the remains from Koneprusy (Czech Republic) to the Magdalenian period, and those from Cro-Magnon (France) and La Rochette (France) to the Gravettian period. The only directly dated European modern human fossils of Aurignacian age are the Pestera cu Oase (Romania) mandible and cranium at ~35,000 14C years before present (that is, ~35 14C kyr BP), the Kent's Cavern (UK) maxilla at ~31 14C kyr BP, the Pestera Muierii (Romania) remains at ~30 14C kyr BP, and the Pestera Cioclovina (Romania) cranium at ~29 14C kyr BP, none of which has a secure and diagnostic archaeological association. Moreover, at least the Oase fossils overlap in time with late Neanderthals from for example, Vindija (Croatia), which is at present dated to ~29 14C kyr BP [since redated to ~32,000 BP] and Arcy-sur-Cure (France) at ~34 14C kyr BP. The assessment of whether the Mladec fossils are indeed Aurignacian in age, and if so, their chronological position within the Aurignacian time span, has become central to understanding early modern humans in Europe (Wild et al. 2005:332, references omitted).