THE PRE-MODERN HUMAN FOSSIL RECORD IN ITALY FROM THE MIDDLE TO THE LATE PLEISTOCENE: AN UPDATED REAPPRAISAL

Abstract

The fossil record from the Italian peninsula is of special interest for assessing the variability of pre-modern human populations (i.e., extinct humans non-belonging to the proper species Homo sapiens) and their evolutionary history. In 2005, a detailed “Catalogue of Italian Fossil Human Remains from the Palaeolithic to the Mesolithic” was published and still represents a milestone on the topic, which however requires a reappraisal. Here we provide a commented overview of the pre-modern human fossil record from the Italian peninsula, where we have included updated information on specimens that were already in the Catalogue of 2005 as well as new discoveries of the recent years, thus providing a comprehensive report of this important regional samples. We hope that this work may represent a useful state-of-the-art on the topic. It also embodies notes concerning the more sophisticated technologies that have been applied in the last years to document and study such a paleoanthropological archive, allowing the acquisition of new data even from old specimens