Why the amazing Altamura Man fossil remains a mystery

This month we’re in an Italian cave with a bellissimo fossil. If I was giving a live talk, at this point I would ask for a show of hands: have you heard of Altamura Man? Since it was new to me, I’m going to guess that most of you will be unfamiliar with it. Which is peculiar, because it’s an astonishing specimen. To find Altamura Man you would need to travel to Puglia (also known as Apulia) in southern Italy: if you think of Italy as looking like a boot, Puglia is the heel. Much of it is karst, a landscape where water draining through bedrock creates sinkholes, springs and caves – including Lamalunga cave near the town of Altamura. In early October 1993, local researchers were exploring Lamalunga cave when they stumbled upon human bones, including a skull. They alerted anthropologists including Eligio Vacca and Vittorio Pesce Delfino at the nearby University of Bari Aldo Moro, who arrived the following evening. It was immediately obvious that the skeleton was in excellent condition. As the researchers wrote later that year, it was “one of the most extraordinary paleontological discoveries in Italy and in Europe”. However, it was also obvious that the skeleton was going to be hard to study. Not only is the cave difficult to operate in, but, as the team wrote the following year, “All the bones are partly covered with, or embedded in, calcareous concretion while others are visible but lined with a calcareous shell of varying thickness.” Bluntly, the skeleton is embedded in rock. It’s 31 years later and the skeleton is still there, still entombed. Thanks to some ingenious researchers, we know more about it than we did in 1993 – but its secrets remain largely untapped because of its fragility and inaccessibility. That’s vexing, but on the plus side, nobody has done anything egregiously stupid. As a result, Altamura Man remains intact. Altamura Man The central problem for anyone wanting to study Altamura Man is that it’s embedded in a speleothem. To answer your immediate question, a speleothem is any rock formation that gradually forms in a cave, often as a result of water flowing through. Stalactites are an example where water dripping from the ceiling leaves behind tiny particles of minerals, which accumulate over the years into dangling pillars. In the case of Altamura Man, the skeleton is smothered in cave popcorn. These speleothems are small nodules of calcite sometimes known as “coralloids”, because they look like the corals that make up a reef. You might think researchers could carefully remove the cave popcorn from the skeleton, but there’s another complication. The bones are not fully fossilised, probably due to the conditions in the cave: the temperature varies a lot and fresh air often blows in. As a result, the bones are fragile. So we have a perfect storm: a cave that’s difficult to get into containing a skeleton that’s both fragile and trapped in hard rock. The solution lies in virtual palaeoanthropology. Over the past decade, researchers have used digital imaging equipment and other advanced technology to study Altamura Man without physically interfering with it. To find out more, I emailed with Costantino Buzi at the Catalan Institute of Human Paleoecology and Social Evolution in Tarragona, Spain, the lead author of the latest study of Altamura Man. Buzi describes the skeleton as “like Godot” – the titular character of Samuel Beckett’s play Waiting for Godot, who famously never shows up – as it’s “often in the conversation but no one can actually see it”. Despite the difficulties in studying Altamura Man, some tantalising snippets have emerged. A 2004 study by Vacca and Pesce Delfino used miniature video cameras to photograph the bones, concluding that the skeleton belonged to an adult male. Five years later, researchers removed a single bone from a small chamber behind the main skeleton, using a procedure inspired by keyhole surgery. The bone, a scapula or shoulder blade, yielded a lot of information. In a 2015 analysis, the researchers dated the specimen to between 172,000 and 130,000 years ago. The shape of the scapula suggests Altamura Man was a Neanderthal – as does the DNA the team extracted. The following year, the palaeoartist brothers Alfons and Adrie Kennis produced a detailed reconstruction of Altamura Man’s face. CAN WE GET THE IMAGE? https://www.kenniskennis.com/altamura-man/ More recently, Buzi and his colleagues have used laser scanning and 3D analysis of photos to study the skeleton. In 2023, they produced a virtual reconstruction of Altamura Man’s cranium. This painted an intriguing picture: although clearly Neanderthal, his skull had some features that are not seen in most Neanderthals, but are found in older specimens from Atapuerca in northern Spain that are thought to be the ancestors of Neanderthals. It may be that the Neanderthals living in southern Italy were isolated from other populations, and as a result retained some older features that Neanderthals elsewhere lost.     Extracting the skeleton This is all gleaned from one shoulder blade and scans of the skull. Imagine what we could learn if we got our hands on the whole skeleton. Buzi says research into Altamura Man is stuck in first gear. “There have been only limited observations with traditional methods, and the works published struggled in getting attention,” he says. “For this reason, Altamura has been quite overlooked.” He wants to work towards a way to safely remove the skeleton. “In my opinion, extraction would be the best way to both study and keep the skeleton in the ideal conditions for its preservation,” he says. This presents a twofold problem: getting the skeleton out, and preserving it. The second problem is arguably easier, says Buzi, because we already have ways to preserve delicate specimens like Ötzi the iceman, who is kept at the South Tyrol Museum of Archaeology in Bolzano, Italy. “It is more difficult to envision the protocols for a safe removal,” says Buzi, but he thinks it’s achievable with “sufficient technical expertise” and funding. Arguably, there has been “an excess of caution” around Altamura Man, says Buzi, but he says that is understandable because “the context is so unique”. Certainly, it’s preferable to the alternative. On the same day Buzi’s latest study was published, the journal it appeared in also released a study of the Juukan 2 rock shelter in Western Australia. Researchers led by Michael Slack at Scarp Archaeology found that Aboriginal Australians had repeatedly visited the site over the past 47,000 years. These people processed bush potatoes as food and left behind a variety of stone artefacts. A piece of braided hair revealed that the ancient visitors were closely related to the Puutu Kunti Kurrama and Pinikura peoples that live in the area today. I mention this because Juukan 2 is not there anymore. It was blown up in 2020 by the Rio Tinto corporation, as part of a mining project. This was, I want to emphasise, permitted under Australian law. It was legal to destroy 47,000 years of Aboriginal Australian heritage. A 2023 paper found a host of flaws in the ways Australian heritage law operates. For instance, there was no way for the traditional owners of Juukan 2 to appeal the decision to allow the destruction, even when the archaeologists found new information about its significance. The deck was stacked in favour of the mining company and against Aboriginal Australian cultural heritage. The contrast with the fate of Altamura Man could hardly be more stark. Some of this is sheer luck – Buzi points out that the area around Lamalunga cave doesn’t contain any valuable mineral resources. Furthermore, the cave is in the pre-existing Alta Murgia National Park, so Altamura Man was already protected before anyone knew he existed. “Luckily, Italy has an old history of protection and management of natural and cultural heritage,” says Buzi. Like Buzi, I would like to see more work done on Altamura Man and Lamalunga cave. If it can be done safely, I would love to see the skeleton extracted from its rocky tomb so its secrets can be plumbed. He has sat in the shadows long enough. But I’m also relieved that this extraordinary specimen has been treated with such care over the past three decades.