Middle-to-Late Pleistocene malacofauna from the archeopaleontological site of Oued Sarrat (Tajerouine area, NW Tunisia)
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ORIGINAL PAPER
Middle-to-Late Pleistocene malacofauna from the archeopaleontological site of Oued Sarrat (Tajerouine area, NW Tunisia) Narjess Karoui-Yaakoub 1 & Moncef Said Mtimet 1 & Semeh Bejaoui 1 & Lamjed Amri 1 & Noureddine Khalloufi 1 & Lassaad Ben Aissa 1 & Bienvenido Martínez-Navarro 2,3,4
Received: 16 June 2015 / Accepted: 11 January 2016 # Saudi Society for Geosciences 2016
Abstract The malacofauna collected from the archeopaleontological site in Oued Sarrat (Tajerouine area, NW Tunisia) is the first reference from the Middle and Late Pleistocene stratigraphic series in Tunisia. These malacologic assemblages are abundant but little diversified; they are considered as continental, lakeside, and fluviatile ecosystem forms. They are associated with bones of small and large vertebrates and lithic artifacts. The dominant species of gastropods are Cernuella virgata (Da Costa, 1778), Xerosecta cespitum (Draparnaud, 1801), and Sphincterochila baetica (Rossmässler, 1854) which are typical of the Mediterranean regions. The abundance of these pulmonate terrestrial gastropods indicates a post-mortem transport of shells by floods and fluvial channels. The only bivalve, Unio ravoisieri (Deshayes, 1847), still common in the rivers of northern Tunisia, characterizes a typical lakeside environment, with relatively low energy. Considering the recently discovered associated vertebrate remains, their occurrence corroborates the onset of a paleoenvironment landscape with swamps, or even a shallow freshwater paleolake with close forests. Hence, this environment also inhabited by a diversity of large mammal species and other abundant microvertebrates and invertebrates was a
* Narjess Karoui-Yaakoub [email protected]; [email protected]
1
Département des Sciences de la Terre, Faculté des Sciences de Bizerte, Université de Carthage, Jarzouna, 7021 Bizerte, Tunisia
2
ICREA, Barcelona, Spain
3
Institut Català de Paleoecologia Humana i Evolució Social, Campus Sescelades URV (Edifici W3), 43007 Tarragona, Spain
4
Àrea de Prehistoria, Universitat Rovira i Virgili (URV), Avda. Catalunya, 35, 43002 Tarragona, Spain
support for human survival within these northern African latitudes. Keywords Malacofauna . Middle-Late Pleistocene . Paleoenvironment . Acheulian . Oued Sarrat . NW Tunisia
Introduction A few and disparate thematic works have dealt with the Pleistocene deposits of Tunisia. In O. Sarrat (Tajerouine area), the first invertebrate collection was produced by the North American paleontologist Pr. Robertson during the 1970s. These were assigned to Neogene. To our knowledge, no systematic excavation with stratigraphic sampling and rigorous marking was undertaken. During the year 2008, a megavertebrate remain of a previously unknown skull was gathered by an amateur non paleontologist; this imposed the necessity to check and evaluate the value and potential scientific contribution of the site paleontological content. Soon after, a Tunisian-Spanish project implying pluridisciplinary specialists has been
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