Hello everyone!
I pleased to invite you to the official site of Central Asian Karstic-Speleological commission ("Kaspeko")
There, we regularly publish reports about our expeditions, articles and reports on speleotopics, lecture course for instructors, photos etc. ...
Dear Colleagues, This is to draw your attention to several recent publications added to KarstBase, relevant to hypogenic karst/speleogenesis: Corrosion of limestone tablets in sulfidic ground-water: measurements and speleogenetic implications Galdenzi,
A recent publication of Spanish researchers describes the biology of Krubera Cave, including the deepest terrestrial animal ever found:
Jordana, Rafael; Baquero, Enrique; Reboleira, Sofía and Sendra, Alberto. ...
Exhibition dedicated to caves is taking place in the Vienna Natural History Museum
The exhibition at the Natural History Museum presents the surprising variety of caves and cave formations such as stalactites and various crystals. ...
Did you know?
That sub-conduit is any void, whether of tectonic or dissolutional origin, that is smaller than the accepted defined size of a conduit. sub-conduits originate under inception conditions and enlarge during gestation, but many fail to achieve larger dimensions when drainage later becomes concentrated along preferred routes. in most cases, however, they will continue to function as part of the micro-fissure, or percolation, system within the rock mass. sub-conduits are an essential part of a continuum of void sizes that extends between microscopic discontinuities and the largest tube passages [9].?
Recent research in Europe, Africa, and Southeast Asia suggests that we can no longer assume a direct and exclusive link between anatomically modern humans and behavioral modernity (the `human revolution'), and assume that the presence of either one implies the presence of the other: discussions of the emergence of cultural complexity have to proceed with greater scrutiny of the evidence on a site-by-site basis to establish secure associations between the archaeology present there and the hominins who created it. This paper presents one such case study: Niah Cave in Sarawak on the island of Borneo, famous for the discovery in 1958 in the West Mouth of the Great Cave of a modern human skull, the `Deep Skull,' controversially associated with radiocarbon dates of ca. 40,000 years before the present. A new chronostratigraphy has been developed through a re-investigation of the lithostratigraphy left by the earlier excavations, AMS-dating using three different comparative pre-treatments including ABOX of charcoal, and U-series using the Diffusion-Absorption model applied to fragments of bones from the Deep Skull itself. Stratigraphic reasons for earlier uncertainties about the antiquity of the skull are examined, and it is shown not to be an `intrusive' artifact. It was probably excavated from fluvial-pond-desiccation deposits that accumulated episodically in a shallow basin immediately behind the cave entrance lip, in a climate that ranged from times of comparative aridity with complete desiccation, to episodes of greater surface wetness, changes attributed to regional climatic fluctuations. Vegetation outside the cave varied significantly over time, including wet lowland forest, montane forest, savannah, and grassland. The new dates and the lithostratigraphy relate the Deep Skull to evidence of episodes of human activity that range in date from ca. 46,000 to ca. 34,000 years ago. Initial investigations of sediment scorching, pollen, palynomorphs, phytoliths, plant macrofossils, and starch grains recovered from existing exposures, and of vertebrates from the current and the earlier excavations, suggest that human foraging during these times was marked by habitat-tailored hunting technologies, the collection and processing of toxic plants for consumption, and, perhaps, the use of fire at some forest-edges. The Niah evidence demonstrates the sophisticated nature of the subsistence behavior developed by modern humans to exploit the tropical environments that they encountered in Southeast Asia, including rainforest
Kitava is the most easterly island of the Trobriand group. It is an uplifted coral atoll, oval in plan, with a maximum diameter of 4 1/2 miles. The centre of the island is swampy and surrounded by a rim that reaches a height of 142 m. Caves occur in various parts of the rim and several have been described in a previous article (Ollier and Holdsworth, 1970). One of the caves, Inakebu, is especially important as it contains the first recorded cave drawings from the Trobriand Islands. Inakebu is situated on the inner edge of the island rim at the north-eastern end of the island. Map 1 shows the location of the cave on Kitava Island. Map 2 is a plan of the cave, surveyed by C.D. Ollier and G. Heers. The location of the cave drawings is shown on the plan. Inakebu is a "bwala", that is a place where the original ancestor of a sub-clan or dala is thought to have emerged from the ground. The bwala tradition is common throughout the Trobriands and neighbouring islands. It has been described by many writers on the anthropology of the area, and was summarised in Ollier and Holdsworth (1969). The people believe that if they enter such places they will become sick and die. Until November, 1968, no member of the present native population had been in the cave, though there is a rumour that a European had entered it about 20 years before, but turned back owing to lack of kerosene. It must be admitted that this tale sounds rather like the stories one hears in Australia that Aborigines were afraid of the dark caves and therefore did not go into them. In fact, the many discoveries in the Nullarbor Plain caves show that they did, and the cave drawings in Inakebu show that someone has been in this cave. The point is that it does not seem to be the present generations who entered the caves but earlier ones; people from "time before" as they say in New Guinea. The first known European to enter the cave was Gilbert Heers, a trader in copra and shell who lived on the nearby island of Vakuta. He went into the cave on 8 November 1968 accompanied by Meiwada, head of the sub-clan associated with Inakebu, who had never been inside before. Heers and Meiwada investigated the two outer chambers but then turned back because they had only poor lights. They returned with better light on 15 November. Since they had not become sick or died, they then found seven other men willing to accompany them. They found the narrow opening leading to the final chamber, and discovered the drawings. None of the men, many of whom were quite old, had ever seen the drawings or heard any mention of them before. The drawings are the only indication that people had previously been in this deep chamber. There are no ashes or soot marks, no footprints, and no pottery, bones or shells such as are commonly found in other Trobriand caves, though bones and shells occur in the chamber near the entrance. With one exception, the drawings are all on the same sort of surface, a clean bedrock surface on cream coloured, fairly dense and uniform limestone, with a suitably rough texture. Generally the surface has a slight overhang, and so is protected from flows or dripping water. On surfaces with dripstone shawls or stalactites, the drawings were always placed between the trickles, on the dry rock. We have found no examples that have been covered by a film of flow stone. The one drawing on a flow stone column is also still on the surface and not covered by later deposition. A film of later deposit would be good to show the age of the drawings, but since the drawings appear to have been deliberately located on dry sites the lack of cover does not indicate that they are necessarily young. There are stencil outlines of three hands, a few small patches of ochre which do not seem to have any form, numerous drawings in black line, and one small engraving.
Wellington Caves, New South Wales (figure 1), have attracted scientific attention for more than a century, largely through discoveries in the cave sediments of bones from extinct animals. These bone discoveries provided impetus for a number of early speculations about the geomorphology of the caves area and its relationship to the caves. Notable among these was the conjecture of Mitchell (1839) that the valley floor sediments of the Bell River and the cave fills had been deposited during a marine transgression about one million years ago. The first systematic geomorphological work was carried out by Colditz (1943), who argued for two distinct relict erosion levels in the Bell Valley; the older level was assigned to the Lower Pliocene and the younger to the Upper Pliocene. Colditz considered that these levels provided evidence for two phases of uplift in late Tertiary times. More recently Frank (1971) made detailed studies of the cave sediments, and devoted some attention to landscape evolution. He believed that the Bell River had been captured by Catombal Creek, during the late Pliocene or early Pleistocene.
The fossils from Wellington Caves, some of them 'giant', are well known to Australian speleologists, finds of importance for the study of Australian fauna from early discovered caves. What I think we did not appreciate was that the Wellington 'bones' have a place in the world history of science of significance also, the theme of this paper. Many of you will have watched the BBC-TV series on 'The Voyage of the Beagle'; much was made of the importance to Darwin in developing his theory of evolution of the fossils he found in southern South America. There fossils of giant relatives of sloths, llamas and armadillos helped to make clear to him the notion of the geological succession of life, a basic part of his theory along with the idea of natural selection to which the finches and the tortoises of the Galapagos Islands proved crucial. However it seems that Darwin was previously aware of the similar significance of the Wellington Caves bones for the law of succession from Charles Lyell's Principles of Geology which quotes William Clift's identifications of dasyures, wombats and kangaroos amongst them. The fact that these recently extinct animals were closely related to the distinctive modern marsupial fauna of Australia counted much against earlier conceptions such as Cuvier's catastrophic theory or Buckland's ideas of successive divine creations within a short time span. Watchers of the TV series will remember the devious role played by the palaeontologist, Sir Richard Owen, in organising public opposition to Darwin at the famous Oxford meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science. This article relates the series of rearguard actions of Owen to maintain that there was a fossil elephant component in the ancient Australian fauna, damaging to Darwinism. But the growing evidence from Australia, not all of it from caves, of course, finally extinguished this red herring, started by that doctrinaire N.S.W. colonial, the Reverend John Dunmore Lang.
Whilst there appears to be a popular belief that Australian Aborigines viewed caves with some trepidation there is much anecdotal and physical evidence that karst caves were used for occupation, art and funery practices. This paper reviews the past and modern literature on Aboriginal use of karst caves on the Tablelands and immediate surrounds. About ten occupation and a lesser number of disposition sites are known as are hand stencils and abstract engraved art. More representational art has been reported in the past and skeletal material of accidental or unknown origin reported widely. Dated sites are few ranging from about 1500 years BP to as old as 23000 years BP.
The sediments filling underground cavities and open fissures represent a major source of fossil vertebrate remains. The significance of such sites is disproportionate to the relatively small volume of sediment which they contain, and arises from the enhanced preservation, compared with surface sites, of both bones and sediments and the operation of one or more concentrative processes. Isolation of vertebrate material from temperature and humidity changes, scavenging and soil organisms greatly increases their preservation potential. Three main types of concentrative mechanism can be recognized: where the animals lived and died in that environment (biotic autochthonous); where the animal remains were transported into that environment by some biotic agency, such as a predator (biotic allochthonouns); and where the animal remains were introduced into that environment as a result of some abiotic process, such as flooding (abiotic allochthonous). The precise mechanism operating in a particular case may be deduced from a consideration of faunal composition, taphonomic criteria and geomorphological and sedimentological contexts, with each concentrative process being characterized by a distinctive combination of these
Hominid bones from Border Cave (BC) have been the subject of controversy with regard to the question of modern human origins. New dating assays suggest that while some of the BC remains are of comparatively recent age (i.e. < 20 kyr), several postcranial fragments derive from the Middle Stone Age (MSA) layers. Among the latter, a proximal ulna in comparable to one from the MSA at Klasies River Mouth, in that both have an archaic pattern of morphology in the relative height of the coronoid and olecranon processes. This configuration appears to characterize Neandertals, and is displayed also by more ancient African ulnae. The BC humeral diaphysis has moderately thick cortical bone, but us otherwise unremarkable. The proximal ulnar morphology might suggest that the MSA inhabitants of South Africa engaged in activities similar to those of Neandertals and other postcranially archaic hominids. If the modern-looking BC-1 cranium in contemporaneous with the BC postcranial bones, this would bear testament to the mosaic nature of human evolution. Alternatively, if BC-1 proves to be of recent derivation, and the postcrania are as old as the base of the BC MSA sequence has been claimed to be (c. 195 kyr), they might have been associated with more archaic crania (perhaps similar to Florisbad). Final resolution of these questions awaits determination of the absolute ages of the BC-1 cranium and the BC postcranial bones
The bauxite mine at Cornet near Oradea in northwestern Romania produced thousands of bones in an excavation in 1978, mainly from ornithopod dinosaurs and rarer pterosaurs. Bird specimens reported previously from this fauna are equivocal. The fossils are disarticulated bones in good condition which occur highly concentrated in lenses within bauxite clays, which are dated as Berriasian (earliest Cretaceous). The bauxite represents detrital material washed into deep fissures and caves formed within a karst of uplifted Tithonian (latest Jurassic) marine limestones. The bones are generally uniform in size and shape, and they are abraded, evidence for considerable transport and for winnowing of the deposit. The area was one of several islands on the northern shore of Tethys, and it was inundated by the sea later in the Early Cretaceous. There is evidence for insular adaptations in the dinosaur faunas. The ornithopod dinosaurs may include several taxa, but they are smaller on average than an assemblage of typical Wealden ornithopods, perhaps because of dwarfing on the island. In addition, sauropods are absent and theropods are barely represented in the fauna. The fauna is geographically significant since it shows relationships with western Europe and with Asia
Vertebrate fossil materials were collected from over a dozen cave localities on Isla de Mona, Puerto Rico. Guano deposits at these localities were excavated and sifted to recover bone materials. The predominant vertebrate fossils recovered at every sifting site were Audubon’s shearwater (Puffinus lherminieri) bones. Fragmentary undifferentiated lizard bones were also found sporadically in the sifted material. Fossil skeletal bones and fresh bones from other bird species were found on the surface of the cave floors at several localities. Extensive fossil guano deposits on the island are interpreted to be of mixed origin with deposits near entrances primarily derived from bird guano, and deposits from the darker interiors of the caves derived from bat guano.
Magnetostratigraphic analysis of deposits exposed in Cueva del Aleman shows two reversed and two normal chronozones. The lower normal polarity event is observed in a clastic dike and probably predates initial cave formation. Sediments deposited inside the cave proper show a R-N-R sequence and probably date to at least 1.8 Ma. A fossiliferous clastic dike contains normal polarity with an overlying reversed magnetozone. Audubon’s Shearwater (bird) bones occur in the dike, which is tentatively correlated with the lower N polarity zone predating cave formation. If this correlation is correct, the Audubon’s Shearwater (Puffinus lherminieri) range can be extended back to at least 1.8 Ma, the Olduvai subchron
Horaglanis krishnai Menon is a blind catfish inhabiting the dug- out wells at Kottayam, Kerala, South India. Studies on the cranial osteology of the fish show that the bones on the skull are firmly articulated. The frontoparietal fontanella is very large so that the cranium virtually lacks a roof. The sphenotics and alisphenoids are hardly recognizable and the orbital bones are entirely lacking. In osteological features H. krishnai closely resembles Uegitglanis zammaroni. But in H. krishnai the orbital bones are further reduced or even absent. The fontanella is larger than that of any other known catfish. These two species must have evolved from the same ancester and have taken up nearly identical ways of life. The difference between the skeletons of these two appears to be largely dependent on the relative size of the frontoparietal fontanella. Its greater development in H. krishnai brought about a suppression or reduction of some of the bones clearly visible in Uegitglanis. It would appear that the modification initiated in Uegitglanis gatered momentum in Horaglanis. These two fishes form a group distinct from clariids and bagrids but form a connecting link between the two.
