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ANTHROPOLOGIE, vol.118, no.1, pp.108-113, 2014 (SSCI)
The study of the site of Kocabas, which yielded an archaic Homo erectus skullcap; was undertaken in 2011 and 2012, at the request of Professor Mehmet Cihat Alcicek. This interdisciplinary French-Turkish research programme comprised the geochronological, magnetostratigraphic, biochronological and paleoenvironmental study of the site and the paleoanthropological study of the skullcap itself. The association of large mammals enabled us to attribute the travertine formations bearing the skullcap to the second part of the Upper Pleistocene, and more specifically to between 1.5 and 1.2 million years, because of the disappearance or appearance of certain species. This biochronological age is confirmed by the paleomagnetism study, which places the travertines bearing the skullcap in a period of reversed polarity, underlying a normal polarity formation, which could be attributed to the Cobb Mountain paleomagnetic excursion, dated to 1,194,000 years. The dating of these fauna by the Al-26/Be-10 cosmogenic nuclide method by Anne-Elisabeth Lebatard yielded an age older than 1.22 Ma and more recent than 1.5 Ma. The Hominid skullcap from this formation can be attributed to a Homo erectus, slightly more evolved than those of Homo ergaster KNM-ER 3733 (1.78 Ma) and KNM-ER 15,000 (1.5 Ma), similar to that of Daka (Bouri), which is about a million years old and older than the Bodo fossil (estimated at 600,000 years) and Kabwe (between 300,000 and 120,000 years). The archaic Homo erectus skullcap from Kocabas, referred to as Denizli Man, proves that Homo erectus was already present in Anatolia, at the crossroads of Africa, Asia and Europe, a little more than 1.2 million years ago. (C) 2014 Elsevier Masson SAS. All rights reserved.