The ‘Semi‐Sterile Mousterian’ of Riparo Bombrini: evidence of a late‐lasting Neanderthal refugium in Liguria
Bibliographic record
Abstract
ABSTRACT Constrained by the Maritime Alps and a steep coastal shelf, Liguria served as a biogeographic corridor linking mainland Western Europe to peninsular Italy throughout the Late Pleistocene. It may also have served as a biogeographic refugium for Neanderthals, since sites in the region have yielded some of the latest Mousterian dates in Western Europe and, paradoxically, some of the earliest dates for Protoaurignacian occupations. This paper presents an overview of the Neanderthal presence in Liguria between Marine Isotope Stage (MIS) 5 and MIS 3, with a particular focus on the record from the Balzi Rossi site complex. This permits a critical evaluation of diachronic shifts in the Neanderthal occupation of Liguria. This is followed by an analysis of new data from ‘semi‐sterile Mousterian’ Level MS at Riparo Bombrini that show it was occupied very ephemerally by the end of the Mousterian, highlighting major late Neanderthal behavioral shifts. We conclude by proposing that this behavioral pattern is best explained by the last Neanderthals of the Balzi Rossi having occupied the region as an ecologically stable, taxon‐specific in situ micro‐refugium. This has implications for our understanding of Paleolithic refugia more broadly and of the social and ecological conditions in place during the terminal Mousterian period in western Liguria.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.006 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".