Environment and hunting territories for Late Neanderthals in central Italy: new palaeoecological data from Grotta dei Santi (Monte Argentario – Tuscany, Italy)
Bibliographic record
Abstract
• The Mousterian sequence of Grotta dei Santi (central Italy) is dated to MIS 3. • Palynological study of hyaena coprolites reconstruct the vegetation landscapes. • The Late Pleistocene vegetation in the Grotta dei Santi shows temperate climatic conditions. • The regional pollen comparison constrained the Neanderthal presence in the GI-12. • Neanderthals did not abandoned the cave and the surrounding area for environmental stress. The Italian peninsula is a key biogeographical region in southern Europe, which acted as a refugium for flora and fauna and favoured the persistence of human groups during the Late Pleistocene. This study uses pollen analysis of coprolites from the Late Mousterian site of Grotta dei Santi, (Monte Argentario Promontory, Tuscany, Italy), in which the Palaeolithic human presence is chronologically constrained between ̴ 48 and 44 ka BP. The vegetation landscapes during Marine Isotope Stage (MIS) 3 were reconstructed and compared with other palaeoenvironmental proxies from the same site. Palynological analyses revealed a semi-forested/forested environment within the Mediterranean landscape, with a relatively high diversity of woody taxa, including conifers, mesophytic angiosperms, elements of Mediterranean forest and of xerothermic scrub. The most remarkable result is the persistence of temperate climatic conditions throughout the studied sequence, even at the beginning of Greenland Stadial 12, as shown by both pollen and microfaunal records. This allowed the local maintenance of an unchanged availability of environmental resources. In this light, we assume that the definitive abandonment of the cave by Mousterian people cannot be linked to environmental stress. In other words, other factors must be taken into account to explain the possible demographic gap that seems to have occurred in the coastal area of southern Tuscany between the last Mousterian groups and the arrival of early modern humans at the nearby site of Grotta La Fabbrica. In a broader perspective, our work contributes to adding a new piece to the debate on the complex dynamics associated with the demise of Neanderthals in Europe.
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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 | 0.004 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| 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".