All language subtitles for 7 Mathieu Duval - interview Q2 [360p]

it's it's important to combine different approaches

and to combine different dating methods

and usually

it's easier to date the site

of the sediment that is associated to the fossils

because you have very difficult methods

that you can potentially use to date this

sedimentary metrics

but still there is an uncertainty about

how close is the sediment

whether sediment is closely associated with a fossil

or not so you still have this uncertainty

so to minimize that

it's also important to date the facility itself

so that's why we try to combine

these two different approaches

and there's this site

for example

in Spain which is called Atapoca Grande Arena

so it's in northern Spain

the site has been declared

UNESCO World Heritage in 2000

it is a very impressive cave

where you have a sedimentary fitting of 25 meters thick

where they found different archaeological levels

and in one of these archaeological level

they found how many remains of fossil fossils

the oldest fossils

human fossils found in Western Europe

actually attributed to a new species called omontesisor

and we know that this

this fossil is

the age of this fossil

is between 800,000 and 900,000 years

which makes it

the oldest known human species in Western Europe

and how did we came up

how did we come up with this estimation

uh we basically dated uh

the sediment uh

within this unit

uh using a method called thermolineminescence

another method called optical stimulated luminescence

and we also

dated the large mammal facilities that were found there

from rhinos and from horse

horses and but in addition to that

we also dated the fossils

the human fossil itself

and everything was consistent

to give this age estimate

of between 800 and 900,000 years so it's

it's it's it's really important to combine

a different dating methods