Morphological description and morphometric analyses of the Upper Palaeolithic human remains from Dzudzuana and Satsurblia caves, western Georgia

While paleoanthropologists and archaeologists agree that western Georgia was used as a thoroughfare of human movements to and from the Caucasus (Pinhasi et al., 2012, Pinhasi et al., 2014), the paleoanthropological fossil record of the local Middle and Upper Palaeolithic in this key region is currently limited to scant human remains. For the Late Pleistocene, the Middle Palaeolithic (MP) Georgian human fossil record consists of a partial maxilla from the site of Sakajia and some isolated teeth from the sites of Bronze Cave, Djruchula, Ortvala and Ortvale Klde, which were all classified as Neandertals (Pinhasi et al., 2012). The Upper Palaeolithic (UP) fossil record consists of a modern human tooth from Bondi cave (Tushabramishvili et al., 2012), recently dated between 39,000 and 35,800 cal. BP (calibrated years before present; Pleurdeau et al., 2016), and cranial fragments from Sakajia, dated between 12,000 and 10,000 cal. BP (Nioradze and Otte, 2000) (Supplementary Online Material [SOM] Fig. S1). Therefore, even though some authors suggest that the Caucasus represents a sort of cul de sac for Neandertal survival, and that modern humans arrived in this area much later compared to other regions (Bar-Yosef and Pilbeam, 2000), the paucity of human remains prevents any conclusive assessment. Here we report additional Upper Palaeolithic human remains from the Imereti region, western Georgia (SOM Fig. S1): two isolated teeth from Dzudzuana cave, Dzu 1 and Dzu 2 (both deciduous; Bar-Yosef et al., 2011), and one isolated tooth (SATP5-2, deciduous) and a hemi-mandible (SATP5) bearing permanent and deciduous teeth (SATP5-3 - SATP5-7) from Satsurblia cave (Pinhasi et al., 2014). In particular, the human remains from Dzudzuana cave, dated between 27,000 and 24,000 cal. BP, fill a huge gap in the Upper Palaeolithic Georgian fossil record and play an important role in the debate about modern human peopling of the Caucasus.