Amphibian taphonomy and its application to the fossil record of Dolina (middle Pleistocene, Atapuerca, Spain)

The middle Pleistocene site of Atapuerca (Spain) has many archaeological, p alaeontological and human remains in stratigraphic position. Amphibian rema ins are abundant and easily identifiable in many levels of the site. We hav e investigated the taphonomy of the amphibian remains, with the question to be answered being their source. Did the amphibians live and die inside the cave, as occurs naturally nowadays, or were their remains brought into the cave by predator activity or by other agents such as sedimentary motion, w ater transport, etc. There is no reference source of taphonomic alterations on amphibian remains and we provide some basic background for this, using two approaches. One consisted of analyzing a collection of seats and pellet s of known predators, and based on the alterations and breakage present in the bones digested by each, we produce a set of categories that will be an analytical tool to be applied to the fossil record. Secondly, we have carri ed out several laboratory experiments to measure the effects of weathering and water transport on amphibian remains. We subsequently analyzed the foss il amphibian remains from the middle Pleistocene site of Dolina (Atapuerca, Spain). The results showed that the taphonomic processes observed in the A tapuerca sequence of TD4-TD5 are the same, and the amphibian remains at the se levels entered the cave deposits in the seats of a mammalian predator. T his has been identified as a mustelid, which is an opportunistic predator w hich would feed on amphibians from the surrounding environment. (C) 1999 El sevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.