Mammoeten en Neushoorns van twee vindplaatsen uit het stroomgebied van de oer-Maas gecorreleerd

Investigations of skeletal remains of late Pleistocene megafaunal species and early Holocene mammals from two sites show a lot of similarities.The sites are De Groote Wielen near ’s-Hertogenbosch and the Eurogeul (Eurogully), North Sea, off the coast of the province of South-Holland, the Netherlands. The faunal composition is almost identical. 14C dates indicate that the mammoth fauna from the Weichselian of the two localities are more or less of the same age. These results could be very interesting for DNA investigations on species such as woolly mammoth (Mammuthus primigenius) and woolly rhinoceros (Coelodonta antiquitatis). In this overview the published 14C dates are summarized and new 14C results of woolly mammoth and woolly rhinoceros are presented for the first time. These new results show that the populations of the woolly mammoth and woolly rhinoceros of the localities De Groote Wielen and the Eurogeul existed contemporaneously in the floodplains of the ancient river Meuse, with its delta somewhere in the area of the present-day Eurogeul in the North Sea, off the coast of South-Holland. Ten skeletal parts of both woolly mammoth and woolly rhinoceros have been sampled for DNA investigations in Germany.