Fossil soils

Finally, we succeeded in collecting small-mammal material suitable in all respects for age determination in quarry no. IV of Dunaalmas, a locality to which Schweitzer drew my attention (Pictures 9, 10 and 11). The locality comprises the quarry at the highest point, 280 m a.s.l., of the Almasi Hill, about 2 km south of the village. The patch of freshwater limestone was indicated in Schr ter s (1953) map, with no added comments. As in 1975, the free northwestern profile of the quarry stood at a height of about 10 m, with the lowermost 3 m composed of freshwater limestone, followed by 1 m of reddish-brown sandy and loessy fossil soil, and finally 5-6 m of compact freshwater limestone (Figs. 9 and 10). Washing of about 1 metric ton of the fossil soil... 

The bone finds recovered from the fossil soil of the top of the profile directed our attention to the site, which we named locality no. 6 of Siitto (Picture 17). Apart from the uppermost brownish-black layers, the lower series seemed to be macroscopi-cally homogeneous sandy loess nevertheless, we separated the faunas of 40-50 cm thick layers (Fig. 30). 

Layer no. 6/2 was blackish fossil soil. It contained the following vertebrate finds... 

Van den Broek, J.M.M. van der Waals, L. (1967) The late Tertiary peneplain of south Limburg (The Netherlands) Silicifications and fossil soils a geological and pedological investigation. Geologie en Mijnbouw 46, 318-332. 

Present-day researches have shown that the climate of Central Asia varied rather widely. The proxy paleoclimatic data (sporo-pollen analysis, reconstraction of the levels of ancient lakes, fossil soils, archeological materials) prove that in different time periods essential changes in the water and heat balance were recorded on the territory of the modem Aral basin. The major global climate events, the response to which is detected also in the climate of Central Asia, were Eemian (about 125,000 years ago), the Last Glacial Maximum (about 21,000 yeas ago), and the mid-Holocene optimum (about 6,000 years ago). 

Paleosols are fossil soils. They have formed by weathering in the subaerial environment and so have the potential to provide information about the composition of the atmosphere at... 

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