Living in a time of change: Late Pleistocene/Holocene transitional vertebrate fauna of Grot Skeliastyi (Crimea, Ukraine)

ABSTRACT

The paper presents the results of the study of vertebrate fossil assemblages recovered from the Grot Skeliastyi rock shelter in south-western Crimea (Ukraine). The deposition of its fossil-bearing layers covers the time span from the Late Glacial to the early Holocene. The studied sample consists of 2,736 bones belonging to 52 species of vertebrates (including 3 fishes, 1 amphibian, 12 reptiles, 10 birds, 26 small and large mammals). Among them, the past presence of the Aesculapian snake, four-lined ratsnake, squacco heron, tree pipit, and water pipit in the region is here documented for the first time. Extinct taxa in the faunal assemblage of Grot Skeliastyi were represented by wild horse, European ass, steppe bison, and woolly mammoth. Remains of small animals were accumulated due to the feeding activity of the eagle owl, while bones of large mammals could have been a part of the prey of carnivores but mostly are associated with the hunting activity of ancient people who inhabited the rock shelter. Most of the species persisted from the Pleistocene to the Holocene without losses. Our results indicate that the Pleistocene/Holocene transition in Crimea was not characterised by drastic faunal changes unlike those in other parts of Eastern Europe.Not StartedCompletedRejected

KEYWORDS:

• Vertebrates
• diversity
• taxonomic richness
• Bølling–Allerød
• Preboreal–Boreal
• Europe

Acknowledgments

The research of the first author (O.K.) was supported by Professor Stanislaw Tołpa Scholarship offered by Wrocław University of Environmental and Life Sciences (Poland) in 2020. The authors express sincere thanks to N. Benecke, A. Dulitsky and K. Stefaniak for their help with literature search. We are thankful to A. Nadachowski, B. Ridush, K. Stefaniak and Ş. Vasile for their constructive comments. We also express our thanks to the editor G. Dyke for his effective management of our submission. We are thankful to Z. Barkaszi for linguistic corrections of the text.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.