The Grotte du Renne's faunal remains and bone tools were extensively preserved with glues and consolidants, and indeed this was the single site among those dated by the Oxford-led project to assess the chronology of the Middle-to-Upper Paleolithic transition in Europe [34] where such kinds of samples, otherwise rejected as unsuitable, were used—in fact, at the Grotte du Renne, they represent as much as 84% of the determinations.
http://plosone.org/article/info:doi/10.1371/journal.pone.0021545#article1.body1.sec3.p4

In page 5, we wrote: "The Grotte du Renne’s faunal remains and bone tools were extensively preserved with glues and consolidants, and indeed this was the single site among those dated by the Oxford-led project to assess the chronology of the Middle-to-Upper Paleolithic transition in Europe [34] where such kinds of samples, otherwise rejected as unsuitable, were used." Although no such samples of Middle-to-Upper Paleolithic age were used for the sites published in the cited reference, Tom Higham, from the Oxford Accelerator, informs us that consolidated, solvent-extracted samples were used at a number of other, as yet unpublished sites.


François Caron 1, Francesco d’Errico 2,3, Pierre Del Moral 1, Frédéric Santos 2, João Zilhão 4

1 Institut National de Recherche en Informatique et en Automatique Bordeaux Sud-Ouest, Institut de Mathématiques de Bordeaux, Université de Bordeaux, Talence, France.

2 Unité Mixte de Recherche 5199 De la Préhistoire à l’Actuel: Culture, Environnement et Anthropologie, Université de Bordeaux, Talence, France.

3 Institute for Archaeology, History, Cultural and Religious Studies, University of Bergen, Bergen, Norway.

4 Seminari d’Estudis i Recerques Preistòriques, Universitat de Barcelona/Instituciò Catalana de Recerca i Estudis Avançats, Barcelona, Spain.