LOESSFEST'09 | Aug. 31st – Sept. 3rd, 2009 |Novi Sad-Serbia
Terrestrial Molluscs and Millennial-Timescale Environmental Changes in Western Europe During the Weichselian Upper Pleniglacial
Moine, O.1
1Paléoenvironnements & palynologie, institut des sciences de l’Évolution (UMR CNRS 5554), université Montpellier-2, case 61, place Eugène-Bataillon, 34095, Montpellier cedex 5, France
Previously to the digging of the canal “Seine-Northern Europe”, several archaeological test pits operated by the National Institute for Preventive Archaeology (INRAP) offered the opportunity to sample new Upper Weichselian loess sequences for molluscan studies in northern France. Up to now, studied sites provided a few number of species in adequation with the previously compiled data for the region. Indeed, cold, humid and poorly vegetated environments prevailed in north-western France and Benelux, whereas conditions were drier and the vegetation more developed in the Middle Rhine Valley in Germany. Nevertheless, the molluscan records analysed in these new loess profiles show that the dynamics of the mollusc faunas associated with the alternation of loess layers and tundra gley horizons is similar in both environmental domains. Consequently, both this result and the ressemblances between the shape of grain size records from northern France, Germany, Czech Republic and Ukraine reinforce the idea that a global/regional climatic forcing is at the origin of millenial-timescale changes in the Nussloch molluscan fauna during the Upper Pleniglacial. However, because of the condensed, or incomplete, sedimentary budget characterising northern France loess sequences, and the lack of absolute datings for studied sites and the unequal, or questionable, reliability of available absolute datings that mark out the synthetic stratigraphical pattern for north-western France and Benelux, all millenial-timescale changes in molluscan fauna from north-western France cannot yet be precisely correlated with those distinguished in Nussloch.