Abstract
AbstractCaves are important fossil repositories which provide records extending back over million-year timescales. While the physical processes of cave formation are well understood, the timing of initial cave development and opening—a more important parameter to studies of palaeontology, palaeoanthropology and archaeology—has proved more difficult to constrain. Here we investigate speleothems from the Naracoorte Cave Complex in southern Australia, with a rich record of Pleistocene vertebrate fossils (including extinct megafauna) and partly World Heritage-listed, using U-Th-Pb dating and analyses of their charcoal and pollen content. We find that, although speleothem formation began at least 1.34 million years ago, pollen and charcoal only began to be trapped within growing speleothems from 600,000 years ago. We interpret these two ages to represent the timing of initial cave development and the subsequent opening of the caves to the atmosphere respectively. These findings demonstrate the potential of U-Th-Pb dating combined with charcoal and pollen as proxies to assess the potential upper age limit of vertebrate fossil records found within caves.
Funder
Postgraduate Writing-Up Award supported by the Albert Shimmins Fund
Department of Education and Training | Australian Research Council
Publisher
Springer Science and Business Media LLC
Subject
General Earth and Planetary Sciences,General Environmental Science
Reference67 articles.
1. Stock, G. M., Granger, D. E., Sasowsky, I. D., Anderson, R. S. & Finkel, R. C. Comparison of U–Th, paleomagnetism, and cosmogenic burial methods for dating caves: implications for landscape evolution studies. Earth Planet. Sci. Lett. 236, 388–403 (2005).
2. Häuselmann, P., Plan, L., Pointner, P. & Fiebig, M. Cosmogenic nuclide dating of cave sediments in the Eastern Alps and implications for erosion rates. Int. J. Speleol. 49, 3 (2020).
3. Harmon, R., Thompson, P., Schwarcz, H. & Ford, D. Uranium-series dating of speleothems. Natl. Speleol. Soc. Bull. 37, 21–33 (1975).
4. Richards, D. A., Bottrell, S. H., Cliff, R. A., Ströhle, K. & Rowe, P. J. U-Pb dating of a speleothem of Quaternary age. Geochim. Cosmochim. Acta 62, 3683–3688 (1998).
5. Woodhead, J. D. et al. The antiquity of Nullarbor speleothems and implications for karst palaeoclimate archives. Sci. Rep. 9, 1–8 (2019).
Cited by
6 articles.
订阅此论文施引文献
订阅此论文施引文献,注册后可以免费订阅5篇论文的施引文献,订阅后可以查看论文全部施引文献