CASTEL DI GUIDO, Italy — Some 300,000 years ago, ancient elephants trudged into a shallow river to drink, but found their legs stuck in the mud. Eventually, they fell and died there, attracting scavenger animals and pre-humans, who fed off the meat and made tools from the bones.
After 17 years of excavations, the site, packed with thousands of animal bones and tusks the length of station wagons, opens to public for the first time this month. Visitors can stroll along walkways above the half of the site that has been excavated, a little larger than an Olympic swimming pool, to view the bones while excavators use metal instruments and brushes to continue the dig.
Archaeologists have unearthed a nearly complete skeleton of an ancient elephant with only a few parts disconnected and dispersed as well as the skeleton of an ancient wolf that researchers at the site believe ventured into the muck to feed on the plentiful meat.
Fossilized bones from ancient forms of deer, oxen, horses, rhinoceroses, mice, birds, small reptiles and fish all lie in the hardened earth of the prehistoric swamp. No pre-human skeletons were found, although excavators discovered 500 primitive instruments made of flint and bone.
The archaeologist heading the project, Anna Paola Anzidei, says the site was particularly important for fossils of the species Elephas antiquus, an ancestor of the modern elephant.
"We can look at the teeth of the elephants to discover more about their diet," she says. "We can look at the chemicals in the bones and see changes in the environment."
Though there are several other similar sites in Italy, La Polledrara di Cecanibbio holds the oldest, most plentiful and best-preserved bones due to the abundance of the gas fluorite in the region, scientists say.
"The site preserves the best sample from anywhere in the world of Pleistocene elephants (Palaeoloxodon) from that period of time," says professor of palaeobiology Adrian Lister at University College London, who visited the site in October 2001. "The study of skulls, for example, will help us better understand the relation of this population to other fossil elephants. That work has not been done yet."
Geology professor Larry Agenbroad at Northern Arizona University in Flagstaff, who oversees the U.S. site, highly praised the Italian location, which he viewed in October 2001.
Tours in English, Italian and French will be available by arrangement with the Archaeological Superintendent's Office of Rome on the second and fourth Fridays and Saturdays of every month.
For information
Call the Archaeological Superintendent's Office of Rome at 39-06-678-7804.