Neanderthals on the Lower Danube: Middle Palaeolithic evidence in the Danube Gorges of the Balkans

The article presents evidence about the Middle Palaeolithic and Middle to Upper Palaeolithic transition interval in the karst area of the Danube Gorges in the Lower Danube Basin. We review the extant data and present new evidence from two recently investigated sites found on the Serbian side of the Danube River - Tabula Traiana and Dubocka-Kozja caves. The two sites have yielded layers dating to both the Middle and Upper Palaeolithic and have been investigated by the application of modern standards of excavation and recovery along with a suite of state of the art analytical procedures. The presentation focuses on micromorphological analyses of the caves' sediments, characterisation of cryptotephra, a suite of new radiometric dates (accelerator mass spectrometry and optically stimulated luminescence) as well as proteomics (zooarchaeology by mass spectrometry) and stable isotope data in discerning patterns of human occupation of these locales over the long termResearch at TT and DK was supported by the High Risk Research in Archaeology grant of the National Science Foundation (BCS‐0442096) in 2004, British Academy Small Grant 40967 in 2005, the McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research in Cambridge grants in 2005, 2008 and 2009, Cardiff University in 2013 and 2017, the NOMIS Foundation in 2019–2020 (all to DB), and the European Research Council Starting Grant Project HIDDEN FOODS grant agreement no. 639286 (to EC) in 2017. Research on cryptotephra and several AMS radiocarbon dates were funded through the UK Natural Environment Research Council (NERC) consortium ‘RESponse of Humans to Abrupt Environmental Transitions’ (RESET, NE/E015670/1 and NE/E015913/1). Stable isotope analyses were supported by the European Research Council Starting Grant Project SUBSILIENCE grant agreement no. 818299 (to AMB). CAIF thanks Tonko Rajkovača, McBurney Geoarchaelogy Laboratory, Department of Archaeology University of Cambridge, for making the thin section slides and Chris Rolfe and Dr Steve Boreham of the Department of Geography, University of Cambridge are thanked for conducting the pollen preservation assessment. Als Chemex of North Vancouver is thanked for producing the multi‐element figures. DB thanks Brandon Fowler for his help with the MALDI‐TOF at the Department of Chemistry, Columbia University, Maria Gurova for drawings 1 and 3 of flint artefacts on Fig. 7, Miljana Botunjac for drawings on Figs. 11 and 12, and Andrea Zupancich for the base map in Fig. 1. We also thank two anonymous reviewers for their constructive comments that improved the presentation of our results. The radiocarbon dating was supported in the main by the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Seventh Framework Programme (FP7/2007–2013)/ERC grant agreement 324139 “Palaeo-Chron,” awarded to Professor Tom Higham, University of Oxford. This funding also supported Rachel Hopkins’’ doctoral research