New signs of skeletal trauma in the Upper Paleolithic "Principe" from Arene Candide Cave (Liguria, Italy) bear novel insights into the circumstances of his death.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Despite ample evidence that Paleolithic humans hunted large and dangerous carnivores, such as lions, leopards, and bears, skeletal evidence of negative interactions with wild fauna is extremely rare in the Homo sapiens paleobiological record. To date, the only individual for whom an animal attack has been hypothesized based on their pattern of traumatic lesions is the Gravettian adolescent buried at Arene Candide Cave in Liguria (northwestern Italy; 27,900-27,300 cal BP) nicknamed "Il Principe" (The Prince) due to the rich grave goods placed in the burial. Since its excavation in 1942, it was noted that this individual was missing part of the mandible and half of the left clavicle, leading to the hypothesis of an attack by a large animal, likely a bear. However, this claim was never fully investigated. We reanalyzed these lesions and systematically examined the skeleton for additional evidence to reconstruct the manner and circumstances of death. Our analysis confirmed the perimortem nature of the mandibular and shoulder lesions and identified other possible fractures related to the violent event in the cranium, dentition, and possibly the cervical spine. Additional perimortem trauma, including a linear marking on the left parietal and a puncture mark in the fibula, supports the hypothesis of animal mauling. Given the overall traumatic pattern, a bear attack - Ursus arctos or Ursus spelaeus - remains the most plausible explanation. The study also revealed that the Principe had sustained traumatic injuries to his feet - a fracture of the left little toe and osteochondritis dissecans in the right talus - which support the hypothesis that prehistoric foragers experienced limited survival following lower limb injuries. Despite the thoraco-facial trauma and disfiguring wounds, the microscopic analysis suggests that the Principe survived for a few days. The violent event and the long agony may have been reflected in the elaborate burial, following the presumed Gravettian use of formally burying exceptional individuals and exceptional events.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 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 source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), 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".