Mt Circeo 50,000 years ago’: the Guattari’s Cave story

You are on the promontory of Mt Circeo, in the Circeo National Park. Suddenly you notice one of the many natural caves on the promontory. Imagine you traveled back in time 50,000 years and happened to observe a group of our ancestors gathered around an evening fire. Would anyone be amazed to find them chanting, clapping, dancing in unison, or maybe just sitting captivated before the last flickering flame end?

The archaeological record suggests that Neanderthals lived around the Circeo promontory area where they found a perfect site with many natural caves and resources. The Circeo forests gave them firewood, and materials to construct shelters, and spears. At the edges of forests where they hunted large animals like red deer, horse, and wild cattle. Neanderthals had to fight harshly with terrible predators of the time being in competition with the extinct cave bears, Cave lions and Cave Hyenas which were much larger and more powerful than today’s versions.

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The Promontory and its grottoes witnessed the astonishing evidence of prehistoric humans inhabiting the Circeo caves over 50,000 years ago’. In 1939 a skull of a Neandertal man was found and several other findings also prove it was inhabited in prehistorical times. Those who made this and most of discoveries were the archaeologist Carlo Alberto Blanc and his pupil Marcello Zei. The Guattari cave remained unknown until February 24th 1939, following to a landslide that blocked its entrance.

The inside of the cave was full of animal bones. The biggest surprise occurred when the day after the archaeologist Blanc discovered a skull that was lying on the floor. A human cranium attributed to a Neanderthal man whose skull was found perfectly intact in a hollow section on the Guattari’s Cave.

Placed at the centre of a circle of stones, according to the most recent interpretations, the cranium was brought there by carnivorous animals whose remains, along with other 600 fossil bones of 14 species of Pleistocene fauna, form the treasure of this prehistoric treasure. The examination on the found bones brought to one conclusion: the cave was the den of a powerful predator, the Cave hyena (Crocuta spelaea)

and the rests of the man indicated the poor caution in choosing the shelter. The bones had been gnawed on and found partially consumed by cave hyena. Recent reconstructions showed also the cut marks of stone tools.

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The Circeo man was probably a victim of another Neanderthal and then was maybe found and scavenged by hyenas. At the time of Circeo man, during the middle Paleolithic and even the upper Paleolithic (time periods), Neanderthal men were often living in caves, in competition with some kind of cave predator living in there; either cave bear, cave lion or cave

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hyena and surely the Neanderthals and hyenas would have competed for good cave sites. So, the territory of the Circeo was a thriving area for hunting, both for men and for wild animals. The wonderful natural mosaic of the Park is enriched by important prehistoric and archeological finds witnessing man's presence in the Circeo since remote times.