@article{10902/29664,
year = {2023},
url = {https://hdl.handle.net/10902/29664},
abstract = {One of the major challenges in scientific research is to understand past climate and the mechanisms of climate change. Small vertebrates, and especially rodents, are very sensitive to shifts in climate and habitat, and their variations over time in terms of taxa and abundance can be successfully used to reconstruct past environments. The vast array of approaches to palaeoclimatic reconstruction reflects the great effort that has gone into this line of investigation. Recently, the UDA-ODA discrimination technique has been postulated as a more reliable ecologically-based methodology compared to the classical MER method.
To provide biogeographical information to be analysed by the UDA-ODA discrimination technique, the distributions of four species (Sorex minutus, Chionomys nivalis, Talpa europaea and Crocidura russula) documented in levels O, N, E and D of the Abric Romaní site were processed. The results reveal a statistical difference between the climatic values for the occupied distribution areas (ODA) and those for the uncertain distribution areas (UDA). This technique was then applied to small-mammal assemblages from the above-mentioned levels of Abric Romaní, to test whether the use of the ODAs of the species improves the precision of the climatic reconstruction compared to the atlas distributions of the species used in MER procedures. Our results suggest an improvement in the discrimination analysis over the previous MER reconstructions when wider distributions for an assemblage are obtained. The coldest values obtained for level O of Abric Romaní seem to reinforce the pollen interpretation of the level as coetaneous with a cold period. For the whole MIS 3 climatic scenario for Neanderthals, a colder and wetter climate is derived from the small-mammal analysis. However, as different methods and analyses have inherent limitations, a standardization of the methods applied to the different levels and sites should be carried out in order to provide comparable results.},
organization = {Research at Abric Romaní is funded by the Ajuntament de Capellades and Romanyà-Valls S.A., the Catalonian Government (CLT009/18/00054, research groups SGR 2017-859 and SGR 2017-836 (AGAUR)), MINECO (PDI 2021-122533NB-100, PID 2019-103987 GB-C31, HAR 2016-76760-C3-1 and CGL 2015-65387-C3-1-P (MINECO/ERDF)) and the Comunidad de Madrid and Universidad Autónoma de Madrid (SI1-PJI-2019-00488). During the development and writing of this research A.F. had an APOSTD postdoctoral grant (APOST/2021/110, Generalitat Valenciana) co-financed by the European Social Fund and after that a Margarita Salas contract from the Ayudas para la recualificación del sistema universitario español, Ministerio de Universidades del Gobierno de España, financed by the European Union, NextGenerationEU. J.M.L.-G. was supported by a Ramon y Cajal contract (RYC-2016-19386), with financial sponsorship from the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation. The research of A.F., J.M.L.G, P.S., M.G.C., J.V. and H-A.B. is funded by the CERCA Programme/Generalitat de Catalunya. The Institut Català de Paleoecologia Humana i Evolució Social (IPHES-CERCA) has received financial support from the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation through the “María de Maeztu” excellence accreditation (CEX 2019-000945-M).},
publisher = {Elsevier Ltd},
publisher = {Quaternary Science Reviews, 2023, 313, 108186},
title = {Redefining the MIS 3 climatic scenario for Neanderthals in northeastern Iberia: A multi-method approach},
author = {Fagoaga, Ana and Fernández García, Mónica and López García, Juan Manuel and Chacón, M. Gema and Saladie, Palmira and Vallverdú, Josep and Ruiz Sánchez, Francisco Javier and Blain, Hugues Alexandre},
}