Notarchirico, near Venosa (Basilicata, southern Italy), has been known to experts since the 1950s, thanks to numerous archaeological and paleontological findings resulting from research conducted by various study groups.

Since 2016, the excavation campaigns have been conducted by an international research team led by Marie-Hélène Moncel of the Département Homme et Environnement of the National Museum of Natural History in Paris, with the collaboration of scholars from the Department of Earth Sciences of Sapienza and the University of Bologna.

Recent research has deepened our knowledge of the Acheulean lithic artefacts and vertebrate fossils found within a long stratigraphic sequence, dated between 695 and 670 thousand years ago, demonstrating how large mammals such as elephants, hippopotami, bison and deer were widespread in this area, characterised by a warm climate, open spaces and bodies of water.

Today, a new study is part of this line of research, documenting for the first time the coexistence between humans and Macaca sylvanus, commonly known as Barbary macaque. The work, published in the Journal of Human Evolution, follows a collaboration between international scholars, including Raffaele Sardella, Beniamino Mecozzi and Alessio Iannucci of the Department of Earth Sciences at Sapienza University.

"The presence of the Barbary macaque, documented for the first time at Notarchirico," says Raffaele Sardella, "adds important palaeoenvironmental and palaeoecological information. This primate, now widespread in North Africa and reintroduced in Gibraltar, occupied a large part of the European territory during the Pleistocene."

"The coexistence between the Barbary macaque and humans," adds Beniamino Mecozz and Alessio Iannucci, "is documented in very few European localities and raises interesting questions about the interactions between Homo and Macaca almost 700 thousand years ago."

Riferimenti:

Macaca ulna from new excavations at the Notarchirico Acheulean site (Middle Pleistocene, Venosa, southern Italy) - Mecozzi B., Iannucci A., Sardella R., Curci A., Daujeard C., Moncel M.-H. – Journal of Human Evolution (2021). doi.org/10.1016/j.jhevol.2020.102946

Info

Raffaele Sardella
Department of Earth Sciences
raffaele.sardella@uniroma1.it

Beniamino Mecozzi
Department of Earth Sciences of Sapienza University of Rome
beniamino.mecozzi@uniroma1.it