 It's a project, I work in managing the cultural environment section of the Queensland Museum, which used to be called Anthropology in history many years ago. And this is very much a side project. It's really an excavation run by the New Zealand's party of tortoises and funded by a mining company in the central Queensland west of Mackay. This is an illustration by one of our prep guys, actually. Lowry is quite an exceptional sign for the illustrator. Unfortunately, he spent all his time building walls from the museum and painting them. So, he didn't actually use it for what his skills really are. Beside the South Auckland Creek, we've had three seasons there now. It was actually found by folk from the Barra Barna. They were doing cultural heritage surveys for an area that was hallmarked for open coal mining. And they came across a large series of fossil bones. They initially thought were dinosaur bones. It wasn't too unrealistic. It was actually sitting on top of a Jurassic unit. Everything else had been eroded in between. There was a nice, light, light crisis on the horizon sitting on top of that. However, the bones weren't dinosaurs. They were mega fauna. Our patty intelligences got huffnull when that made the modifications. But they also noted the large numbers of artefacts all over the landscape. It wasn't very clear what the relationship was between the mega fauna and the artefacts. This is actually when I was a curator of archaeology at the Queensland Museum. I was invited to come up and have a bit of a poke around with the paleontologists. So, there are essentially three key sites. I'll be talking mostly about South Auckland Creek 9 and a little bit about SWJ, South Auckland Creek. Jonathan has volunteered paleontologists to found that site. The big question that I was interested in is is there actually evidence for interaction between people and the mega fauna at South Auckland Creek? The three sites... South Auckland Creek is at the bottom of a large lake. What comes through comes away is Lake Elphinstone, which is the beginning of that catchment. Lake Elphinstone is quite a large lake and I'll talk a little about its potential a bit later on in this talk. Not very far from this mega fauna site, which I think is significant. This is our paleontologist's drawings of different animals. What we've done is actually investigated the three different sites because it's mostly paleontologists working. I've been sampling smaller areas to try and bring some control to the excavations for understanding where the archaeology may actually be coming from. So, we've undertaken a lot of oversell work at the site. We've got the palochestes in the background and Komodo Draven. We think we have records of Komodo at this site, which is very interesting. Scott Huckill published a paper last year, or the year before in POS 1, suggesting that maybe there's great diversity of varinids in Australia. Perhaps the origins of Komodo were in Australia and it was a migration through the north. And he has biasing dated Komodo sites in Queensland too. I'm not going to talk about taxonomy of the varinids. That's really more our paleontologist's cup of tea. There is what Julie Field has called a partial disarticulation, which is a term I think that the book The Bone Readers really went to town about. But what we do have in the site is some evidence of fauna in close association, which seem to be, these are all juvenile large macropods. There are two or three bones in a close association. So the material may not be washed in any great distance. We also have them in the context. There's lots of remains of yabbies and also some bivalves and things like that. So we've got a fairly good understanding of the depositional context. One very interesting thing is we've got lots of large reptilian carnivores at the site. Megalania has been recovered at the site, but also the terrestrial crocodile quincana, this commoda-sized varinid as well. There's also mastoides, a very large snake, almost the same size as guanabi. Lots of very interesting reptilian carnivores. No, big mammal carnivores. This is the record, the suggestion that we actually have commoda at the site. Megalania was known from one of the sites. Now, this is one of the paleontologist's trenches, initially trying to get an idea of the age of the large varinids. And I've been going back to the site doing more control to actually work out where the artifact horizon might be at the site. And I'll discuss that later in the paper. South Walnut Creek 9, I think is the most interesting one. Here's the shot of the paleontological investigation. Up here in this area is the shaders where I've put a one-square-meter trench to try and work out where some of the artifacts were going. The sediment is actually very heavily consolidated, so it requires a lot of hand picks to get through the material. It's a bit hard to excavate the site. All those dots represent where a scot and his paleontologist have found fossils. Here are some of their scratching his way and some of their OSL-caused site. A lot of the material seems to be juvenile, but we've found that South Walnut Creek 9, a lot of the epithecies aren't fused. They're a biovalve associated with the site. And it's looking more and more like, this is a site where we've got a large, extinct crocodile palanarchus dragging marsupials into that context. Now, this would be, if our OSL estimates are correct, the latest known record of palanarchus. I know that palanarchus is in the pre-human units at Putty Springs. So generally, it's quite a late appearance of palanarchus. But again, many of the megafauna species, we don't really have clear dates on them. This is some of the evidence of the immature individuals. And it seems to be lots of young animals going close to a waterhole and potentially being dragged in by palanarchus. And that seems to be supporting it to finally, which I've talked about in a moment. This is a tax that we've been finding at the site. South Walnut Creek 9, 9 is the one where we've been doing most of our taxonomic analysis. These are the range estimates from the OSL. Haven't been published yet, but they were discussed at a AAA meeting in South Coast and South Wales a few years ago by Scott. And these are the results that he presented. There have been further OSL dates undertaken by Tim Pitch. Griffith University has an OSL lab. John Olly is head of the school there. They've been looking at multiple grains but also single grains and getting a range of different estimates, which put them quite late into the context. If we consider the arguments that were fired by unburnt robots and others, the extinction is within the first several thousand years. The OSL is interesting because it's indicating a different picture at South Walnut Creek. The main thing that I was interested in doing as I was brought on was to try and determine if there was actually a physical association between the artifacts and the megafauna. And the way that I went about this process was by looking at the artifacts, the archeological record, and then assessing its eponymy, the modifications to the bones to see if there was any evidence of butchering or cut marks or that sort of thing. So this isn't the best map. This is by Barrett Habana. They have their own GIS officer. And they've been very much closely involved in all this research. They found the site, invited the Queensland Museum to come in and be involved with the investigation, and they have invited me to come and look further at some of the archeological questions. The main sites are here, which is South Walnut Creek 9, SW Jonathan is around here, and then SW3 is in the south. What I decided to try and do was start excavating from the top layers and coming down to see if we can actually find artifacts in situ with the megafauna. To the left, just off the screen, is a locus 7. This core came out of a locus 5, which is that site there. The paleontologists have found a number of artifacts, but because they've dug them like they're digging potatoes, I suppose, they've come across these artifacts, not in clear context. So it's not always the best way to investigate a site, but locus 7 was a difficult site that I started digging. I spent four days digging at this site with a matting in the end, got down about 50 centimetres, found two artifacts in the first bit, but nothing before. I couldn't see any evidence of cracking in that site, so I won't really talk about locus 7 because, really, it didn't seem to be a very worthwhile exercise spending a couple of weeks trying to dig that one trench. These are some of the artifacts the paleontologists have pulled out of the site. It's more exotic material. Most of it's silk reed. There's a lot of silk reed eroding out of the landscape very close to the megafauna. This is the core that we found. Now a cell has been taken adjacent to it. I showed this to Peter Hiskop a few years ago and thought it was quite convincing. It was actually a core. It was found in the third spit. You can't see it clearly in this image, but the core sat in between. You can see some change in sediment there. It sat in between a crack. So it was actually sitting in the clay and in an infield crack as well. So it's very difficult to say for certain this is in the megafauna units. It's not adjacent to megafauna. It's basically at the very upper part of the megafauna layer. What we decided to do then in the limited time that I had was start focusing on excavating cracks rather than putting in random holes. I thought, well let's see if there's evidence of lithics sliding in between the cracks. And this is a locus 6. We excavated around the crack and decided to excavate the crack independently and wet sieve all that material to see if we could actually find anything coming out of it. No artifacts or anything. There seem to be two different cracking events. The previous one seemed to have a lot of iron stone in the crack, while this is mostly sand infield. A couple of different processes are operating at the site. South Walker Creek Jonathan is the other site which is just here. I was just talking about SW9 it's one of the TOs I actually found this megalaniac vertebra which is in very good condition. And we have found at this site also a few large pro temodon and other prostheses like that. I undertook another controlled excavation. While we had the megafauna I thought we'll start above that and slowly come down. It was a very ambitious start of a 2x2 meter trench. I got through the first spits, realised the time was running short so I just went down. Again, artifacts really only came out of the first 10 centimeters. This is one of the jokes we found at this site. So again not really clear significance that we're finding artifacts in that megafauna unit. Very interestingly the depositional context is quite different here. It's mostly sand in this unit. I'll discuss the possible meaning of that later. So quite a few meters of sand in this section. So quite easy to get through but again noted with lithics. So the archaeology I don't think there's a clear signature that it's associated with the megafauna. When we start looking at the modifications to the bones there are these V shaped grooves happening in the bones. There are also significant puncture marks which are the same size as the calamarcus teeth. So there seems to be a really nice record of lots of evil things going on with crocodiles but there's not really any clear signature that humans are interacting with the bones and we've gone into further details with the calamarcus marks. We've also looked at a more microscopic scale and found these sort of striations that are commonly associated with trampling of fauna. Many reports discuss these sort of signatures I think people have tried to credit these sort of marks and other sites to bring results of modifications with artifacts but really I don't think there's clear evidence that's the case here. We also see these modifications interestingly on the crocodile teeth sort of the same sort of striations if there was an argument being put forward that these could be associated with some kind of processing by people you wouldn't expect to see them on the teeth as well. So I think that these marks seem to cluster in some of the individuals but they probably relate to some other process not really to do with a human agency. Again we can see modifications to the teeth just in the case of striations that we've been observing. I've also looked at our contemporary collections at the QML Zoology collections of crops that have been shot mostly by hunters earlier in the 1900s and these striations seem to be in the contemporary crop teeth too. Not all of them. Some of them have them, others don't. So it's perhaps an invite thing in the crocodile teeth. So one aspect of this I started to look at the toughenomic signature of crocodile damage because there's so much going on with the crocodiles at South Walker Creek I spoke to Wally Wood who was the forensic osteologist for a few decades in Queensland who was able to give the information on a couple of forensic cases and I also interviewed a woman I don't remember about five or six years ago who was a grandmother who jumped on top of a crocodile that was dragging her son's best friend into the ocean and the croc grabbed her arm and snapped her radius and on her so she gave me her radiographs as well. I'll talk about those briefly. This is a male that was killed in 1986 and we've got nice punctual punctum marks punctum marks in his postcarania and all kinds of modifications here. Wally published this in a volume that was edited by Mark Oxham a few years ago and discussed this as perhaps being from parrotfish these remains are found rolling around in the sea. Wally was taken I think on a reef fishing but they actually seem Wally was able to match parrotfish teeth with the postcarania but I'll explain a bit later on these are possibly croc modifications as well. This is the woman who was attacked by one of these crocs and she attacked the croc first but I attacked her as a result she survived too only it grabbed her arm then her other son jumped on top of it and had a pistol and shot it in the back of the head. The crocodile was paralyzed and I was processed by one of our curators so you can see it's going on the museum's collection. Not on display, you can't display crocodiles that have been involved in attacks. I don't think it gives but we did have a lot of questions. So again there's lots of breakages going on with crocs lots of just clear fracturing and besides there was actually let's go to the Australia Zoo which is late Steve Owen Zoo and throw some pigs to crocodiles and try to recover the pigs to get an idea of what sort of modifications are going on. So I was given two feral pigs from National Parks, Queensland to throw to the crocs. This is a massive creature they call in pops he's 70 years old he's a very big crocodile almost 20 feet long and this is an adult people call them pompeas I think this is pompeas So I've got some videos but I don't have time to show them, they're actually quite x-rayed so there's a lot of gore going on the really difficult part was to try and recover the pigs to throw to the crocodiles Steve Owen's people did that Steve Owen's people did that which was very good but this was published last year by Environmental Archaeology and I've got a couple copies of the paper if anyone's really interested and basically there was a chuck called Jackson the Jowl and another fellow called Rob Blumshon had been working an older viagorge for quite a few years where there's examples of early hominids actually the type specimen of homo habilis is actually thought to be the victim of a crocodile attack and there's been some interesting work on that and they did a lot of so much experimental work that observation in the field in the Serengeti the river in the Serengeti you see all those films that the crocodiles talk about every time where the animals are trying to cross during the wet season they've gone back in the dry season and recovered many of the remains and done some really nice work and observations in the field have captured they've broken it into five different stages which we try to divide by looking at our cocks attacking these dead pigs the pigs were dead so I should say that we weren't allowed to throw live pigs to compromise so it did go through all those ethical processes so essentially this stage is a capture and capture is very violent as you can imagine teeth go flying from the crocodile when they crush into them then the killing is actually drowning the animal and they can hold them under water at some time there's much modification going on there just clamping on the animal then the reduction which is basically the butchering process of course they don't have moulders they're just tearing into chunks the reduction process is extraordinarily out New Zealand for example got kicked by a piece of flying pig during the reduction process then they start defleshing then they swallow huge chunks of the animal and that's the stage where we try to get bits off them so they have a huge impact that way eventually they get chased by one crocodile it's amazing footage but anyway what the main pattern was when we cleared up the bones when I cleared up the bones was loads of fracturing going on you can see this is all the crushing and fracturing that you see in a composite of the two pigs and lots of crushing and fracturing which you're not really going to recognise really the only thing that you will diagnose in the field is the puncture marks and potential drag marks that you see and these are some of the modifications we have almost hook loads scores at the end of it Jackson's got this criteria of assessment Jackson is an archaeologist at the Museum in Ausha and has just recently got across to Indiana he's very much into the idea of how do we grade the different modifications from pigs and so so we can see a trend in modifications in some of the topological signatures so just to what does this all mean let me ask you yourself the signature itself I think is really interesting we have these sites that we sit around marine ice stage 3 2 SWJs firmly around 3 with the available survey that we currently have so the signatures are suggesting that the animal may have been surviving later and has been suggested more recently in papers by Tim Flannery and Bill Roberts and others we do have some partial articulation going on at some of the sites at SW3 and 9 at J we seem to have just independent isolated bones I think there's been a very interesting study published last year by Kroganubits which was in the same basin where they looked very carefully at fluvial activity over the last 100,000 years and they were able to identify some distinct phases of increased bed load activity we seem to have the site here MIS3 SWJ SWJ seems to sit nicely around this period where they've identified significant increases in bed load activity that's a site where there's 3 or 4 meters I only excavated 2 meters of it of sand so this is a depositional episode which our dates seem to match with their data for the broader catchment suggesting alright well then we have increased bed load happening around this time so the overall timing of late fluvial activity in the basin seems to be correlating with our understanding, our current age understanding of the megafauna that we have in Southfield Kroganubits are those 2 different episodes there's a significant decline in bed load activity around the Holocene so I think there's a nice model that's been developed by Fogart Griffith University looking at the broader catchment about bed load activity which seems to sit in with some of our current dates for the megafauna in terms of the toponomy there are some modifications to the bones I guess the pinch could be interpreted as modifications done by stone tools but I think the reality of the situation is there's this interesting area of overlap between natural assemblages and cultural assemblages and crocodiles actually and it hasn't been looked at in any great detail in Australia because I don't think crocodiles have really been considered in any great detail as accumulation of bones in archaeological and cultural sites so it's been interesting and this is really what the 2011 paper talks about the idea that we have this interesting area of overlap where there are modifications undertaken by crocs that actually could be interpreted as the result of stone tool marks and we also see very odd modifications in their teeth too which I think may really relate to Jackson the Jailer's suggestion and this is why I looked at our contemporary collection of crocodiles so when a croc picks up its prey often it picks up a lot of grits and grime and sediment and it's mouth at the same time it's grinding bone against teeth, its own teeth and there's gravel and all kinds of stuff going on so some of these life astriations could be the result of actually the inviolab team so it may not actually have anything to do with the depositional context but this seems to be a good suggestion when we look at our contemporary crocs it's not the same signature on all our crocs it would be nice to have the time to actually look at where our crocodiles have come from, what environment and context and maybe look at the sediment and context of their capturing animals the provenance of our crocodiles because a lot of them are early 1900s isn't that great so that's a different sort of project but I think that's an interesting further work that could be done on crocs if someone had interest to keep up that site in Ethiopia there was a paper that was published in Science by Farron and others which suggested there's modifications here that we can claim a high confidence for the butchering processes of ossoepithecines it was a very big thing it's been happening in the years old I think so that's what would be the earliest evidence of people using stone tools and they suggested some of these marks of these modifications by people and these are some of the cases that were in the Science publication I think the reality is and this is some of Jackson Jarl's work which is in preparation is that many of these modifications actually look very similar to crocodile and certainly when you look at the evidence from South Walker Creek some of it, I don't think we have ossoepithecines in South Walker Creek but we do certainly have crocodiles and I think some of the modifications from the Kika stuff and there are a range of different signatures that are identified as possibly being associated with a strong confidence I think some of this stuff is probably crocodile damage and this is certainly what Jackson and Jarl and others were suggesting at a meeting last year in Addis Abedon so there's some value in looking at and I'm very very keen to actually look at the pre-human layers of Cutty Springs where there's a lot of colonnarchous activity to see what modifications are going on to bones in a unit where we know there's actually no human activity here the units are controversial at Cutty Springs but there are definitely pre-human units at Cutty Springs where we have colonnarchous activity so a nice way to test it further would be to look at colonnarchous and what's going on in Cutty Springs there's some experimental work needed and there's a toponymist that's just started at UQ called Tina Mann she's mostly I think worked in the past in the Paleolithic in Spain somewhere she's very interested in becoming involved in Tathamolic work in Australia so she and I have been talking to the Australia Zoo about doing further experimental work with her students to look at the Dacieros and other carnivals that we know are present and record at our sites out here we have smaller modifications to bone it would be nice to actually start developing a database around what these modifications look like I think interestingly this year there's been the paper that's come out in our sites a couple of months ago revisiting Lynch's crater and looking at a cord they took with this dung fungus and the suggestion has been you're not familiar with it this dung fungus, the Explore-Millier is associated, it's decline is associated with the decline of megafauna however there are spikes in this cord that they had the single cord of this dung fungus returning around 31,000 years ago and they've just dismissed that oh that's kangaroos, large kangaroos returning to Lynch's crater, Lake Bay so I'm not sure this is actually really the clincher that says we have an extinction event around 41,000 years I think there's quite a few problems it's only one core, I've been talking a lot to Patrick Most about this this paper he and I have been doing a little bit of work in South East Queensland some of the work he's doing out at Spedbroke Island he's taken several calls in one context and come up with quite different signatures patterns in them but there are different signatures so perhaps more calls are required from Lynch's plan Lake Elphinstone is a really interesting science I think it has a lot of potential it's just over 20 kilometers away from South Walker Creek so we've got a nice megafauna assemblage we're dating at the moment not too far we hope from a lake that may have the potential to do some poem work Patrick and I were going up there in three weeks but now it looks like we'll be early next year we've laid too much it would be nice to get a sequence if this lake can reveal such a sequence to match with the assemblage of megafauna at South Walker Creek this is some of the work we've been doing down at the site at Noorain just south of Brisbane there's an extraordinary collection of artifacts I think collected by a state geologist in the early 1920s which he suggested were about twice as in age he's one of those scientists found the same units as geologists who had scourgedly been documenting and have been finding some really interesting poems at these sites using the old coins of New Zealand records Tindale was very interested in the 1930s of the accounts of scourgedly and I've published a small paper on that if anyone wants a copy of that it's in that bag I think for J9 anyway I might have to keep it so to do some work like this I think it would be really quite valuable so the conclusions at the moment in South Walker Creek as yet there's no clear evidence that human and megafauna are interacting at the site I don't think it's been a waste of time excavating at the site, I think it's really important for archaeologists to work closely with paleontologists to investigate signatures at such places and try to work out what the meaning potentially might be and it will take a while we've had three seasons of this now but I think we're getting a clear picture that the artifacts aren't in those units there seems to be some sort of processes we're working some of them down to those units but at the moment I don't think the archaeology is associated with the fauna also our understanding of the deposition of context it's not the sort of place you'd expect to find archaeologists standing at for anyone there's no place seen archaeology versus archaeology is probably kind of cave excavated by Mulvaney in the early 60s in the late 59s and 62s so we don't really have any signature whatsoever in that region to make any kind of understanding what was going on in the people in the Pleistocene we've been tormented by a number of people there's a lot of mining going on at the moment huge landscapes being destroyed there's the potential to seek further funding to investigate some malaria perhaps population density was low in the region there's a lot of contract archaeology going on they found some mid to early Holocene heart sites but nothing from the Pleistocene so from the experimental data I think that most modifications to the bone is the result of crocs there seems to be other carnivores active in the site smaller carnivores and we'd like to do some experiment work to try and make some more meaning with that the age range that we've got from the OEC was really interesting and it seems to match with the study by croc and others where they've discussed increased gluvial activity loads coming down the creeks and rivers so that's an interesting signature the OEC range doesn't currently support this idea that the extinction was rapid but again this is only one dating technique obviously there's further work that needs to be done and one of the first things that we'd like to do is a further attempt to get a call from Lake Elphinstone and Patrick and his team is very enthusiastic about this also attempt to directly date the megafauna including carbon fordany if they're really in that age range there's enough collagen in them there may be the possibility to do this sort of work I've been chatting to Lucas Heitz about it and it costs $35 I think a sample to assess whether a bone is immediately to C13 so hopefully on the way to AAA now from Brisbane I'll be able to take some samples and drop them off for $350 it seems a bother to get an idea if we can actually attempt to see 14 on these on these Gilbert well that's right I mean a whole chocolate or cold in one of those containers it's amazing anyway the idea of actually trying some kind of uranium series and other approaches Gilbert Price at University of Queensland is very interested he's also a bit skeptical of the technique on teeth in these sort of open contexts if you don't have other things like flow stones or stellar types to match them with I think further taphonomic sparrow work is really important and we've got a potential honest student lined up to start looking at that in more detail next year with Tenor Man and what I have been talking to the Baradaban about is the potential of further exploration of nearby rock shelters Richard Robbins has done some nice work on the actual taphonomy of the structure of rock shelters in Queensland it seems that limestone shelters retain their structural integrity for a much longer period of time than sandstone shelters we get a lot of roof falling collapse and I used to see sites and I know Mike Moore would spend a lot of time doing this in Northern Queensland in these sort of deep cave sites I think is a lot trickier than we may think so perhaps using some sort of auguring initially or even ground penetrating radar when I was out at Mungo for four and a bit years we used GTRB very successfully to trace the Willangia fossil truck wayside there's very clear distinctions between the different units out there I think maybe attempting this to actually work out the integrity of these shelters I'm one at the UQ now in Patrick Moss's section and they're buying the GPR equipment so I think we could potentially do this sort of work before we spend lots of time doing shellfish might be an approach but again we need to do that so that's the way we could potentially take the page so really the work wouldn't have been possible without the support of traditional owners who were very enthusiastic to see the work go ahead they'd found the sites, they were enthusiastic about what they actually meant they run their own consulting wing we're a consulting which a group of Aboriginal cultural heritage officers who work with their own consultant archaeologists so it's been a lovely collaboration working with that group the mining company has also thrown considerable funds towards this project my understanding is now that they don't want to destroy that site, they want to preserve that area which is a nice outcome a group of universities have been doing the OSL work and also university plans has also been involved and I think that's it thank you very much can we hear excavations beneath the artefacts did you find any megafauna remains or be getting the OSL dates? beneath the artefacts no we didn't find any megafauna in the trenches of Ida and we did get in the SWJ sites we've got a it's quite a large Ida 2 metres in the sand one out of that but I just basically want to test in this site we've got I think four or five OSL calls that were taken in there to get a nice sequence to see if that matches with the croaks so unfortunately I didn't find any megafauna in these very carefully done trenches it's an interesting way to approach this site because we're trying to balance the paleontology with the archaeology, they're keen in recovering biological data and reconstructing paleontology and all this stuff but they weren't that enthusiastic about the archaeology so the approach was I tried to dig above the sites and come down to get in this that's it silly question, I mean has Quincana been found extensively elsewhere other than at Quincana yeah that's a couple of tubes I've never been in association near association with humans other than as much older really we're off Monlion used to talk about me usually but he was the curator of paleontology at Quincana some suggestions that were some late by some dates but that was never really verified but no one has been able to date it also a pretty special one if it's correct it will be very special there's lots of special things coming out but there needs to be a lot more special dating too what I'm really excited about is potentially getting some paleological data to try and match with the sites if those records can extend back that far I'm also thinking that Quincana has never been associated with aquatic type crocodilians before no, no there's no you've got a new ecological you've got land predators in the form of these there baronets and aquatic ones in the same spot which seems pretty remarkable who was eating here that's a good question there was also a Zodenturus at Nebo which is another site to the east it hasn't come out of our excavations yet but Zodenturus has often suggested being more of a coastal species but they've got records of it Monday too but I think that might be much earlier than Monday it overlaps in a few spots they can grow and whip up in sort of places but I mean you can ask what the climate was like here in 35,000 years ago it's presumably relatively low rainfall so it should be even less then yes any other questions though? yeah no these guys are all mad keen to do all kinds of new dating so they can probably beat you up later on we'll do ESR we'll do iron weathering whatever you guys are thinking about so getting these exoners to actually say something it's going to be hard shallow sites like this always worry me for luminescence because you've got surface disturbance by soil biota, tree thrower and so on and it strikes me the sooner you get some direct ages on the bone material the more comfortable I feel about the chronology there is a bit of cracking going on with identified sites there is vertical displacement of lithics so vertical displacement of sediments which is a big part of the paleontology so we're running the dating side of it but would your single brain dates resolve that problem? that was the thought and there doesn't seem to be that much mixing in the samples we've got so far all this is to be published a bit like when Scott decides it's time to publish this so it's a good question Dave and that's why we've tried the different techniques with 10 page