ESHE meeting, Madrid

PalaeoChron was well-represented at the recent ESHE meeting in Spain. ESHE is the European Society for the Study of Human Evolution. This year the small town of Alcala de Henares, near Madrid, was the venue. There were three days of scientific programme and a field trip to the Pinilla des Valles Neanderthal sites on the Sunday. There were several highlights of the conference, many very interesting papers on ancient DNA, proteomics, morphometric analysis and archaeological excavation, and a nice social programme too.

We are already looking forward to the next meeting which will be in Leiden, the Netherlands.

PalaeoChron presented 4 main papers at the meeting:

Thibaut Deviese "New methodological advances in dating archaeological bones at the Oxford Radiocarbon Accelerator Unit" (co-authors Daniel Comeskey, James McCullagh, Tom Higham).

Marine Frouin "Dating the Middle-Upper Palaeolithic Transition in western Georgia (South Caucasus): a multi-method (OSL, IRSL and 14C) approach" (co-authors Tom Higham, Jean-Luc Schwenninger, M. Nioradze, T Meshveliani, Anna Belfer-Cohen, Ron Pinhasi).

Rachel Hopkins "Did modern humans enter Europe via the Danube corridor? New results from high precision chronometric modelling" (co-authors Nikolay Sirakov, Jean-Luc Guadelli, Bibiána Hromadová, András Markó, Tom Higham)

Tom Higham "Chronology of the European Aurignacian: towards spatio-temporal mapping of the early spread of modern humans" (co-authors Katerina Douka, Rachel Wood, Thibaut Devièse, Marine Frouin, Jean-Luc Schwenninger, Rachel Hopkins, Daniel Comeskey)