ROME -- Most of us consider the history of Rome to begin with the mythical Romulus. Early Roman historians fixed the date of the city's foundation at 753 BC and this symbolic birthday continues to be celebrated today. But long before the primitive Roma Quadrata was traced out on the Palatine Hill, the remote ancestors of the Ancient Romans were eking out a precarious existence in the hills and low lands around the Tiber estuary. The land around is scattered with traces of their existence.

 It is a little known fact that some of Europe's most important Pleistocenic archaeological sites are to be found around Rome, containing vast deposits of prehistoric flint tools and animal bones.

 “Unfortunately, most of these remains have disappeared, thanks to building development,” said Silvio Seno, Professor at the Department of Science of the Earth and the Environment at Pavia University. “In the 1930s during excavations around the Colosseum, many fossilized bones came to light. Over the next decade some 140 sites were discovered. Most of these have been swallowed up and are no longer visible.”

 Seno, together with Rodolfo Coccioni, vice-President of Geoitalia (the Italian Federation of Science of the Earth) founded the Week of Planet Earth (Settimana del Pianeta Terra) in order to promote Italy's fascinating and often unique geological and prehistoric heritage. 

 360,000 years ago, when the great ice caps had crept down over most of the northern hemisphere, their advance was halted before they reached the central and southern part of the Italian peninsula. This area preserved a mild and sheltered climate, hosting roaming herds of animals like elephants, wolves, antelopes, rhinos, deer, wild horses, wild boar, water buffaloes, wild cats and so on. These were different, however, from the animals we are familiar with today. They were much, much bigger.

 “We've found elephant tusks 4 meters long. They belonged to beasts that were over 3.5m tall and weighed well over nine thousand kilos,” Seno told us

 A couple of Stone Age sites have miraculously survived in the Rome area. The bones and remains of gigantic creatures and the crude stone tools of the primitive men who hunted them are on show at the little-known Casal dè Pazzi Museum in the Rebibbia area and the even lesser known Polledrara de Cecanibbio site off the Via Aurelia. Since these were both discovered fairly recently, their scientific value was recognized.

 Over the past couple of thousand years, deposits of gigantic bones turned up regularly. The ancient Romans were puzzled by the outsized fossils that came to light in quarries and building sites. No-one was able to explain what they were. Augustus was apparently fascinated by them and believed they must belong to a lost race of gods. The scientists of the Renaissance tried to come up with a more rational explanation. They decided they were the remains of exotic animals that had been slaughtered during the games in the Colosseum and other amphitheatres.

 It took the brain of a genius to approach the truth. “Leonardo da Vinci was the very first geologist and palaeontologist,” Coccioni remarked. ”He was the first Renaissance scientist to realise that these bones belonged to creatures that had walked the earth long before the memory of man.”

 The small but well documented Casal dè Pazzi Museum opened in Jubilee Year 2000. The site, on what had been the former right bank of the Aniene river, was discovered by chance in the early 1980s during building work in the rapidly expanding suburb and a planned new road was re-directed in order to preserve the tract of dried river bed strewn with fossils and flints.

 The museum is built directly over the ancient river course, where the incandescent volcanic rocks that spewed from the great Alban volcano were eroded and sculpted by the fast flowing current. A flight of steps leads up to a gallery where we can look down on the tumbled deposits of bones and teeth heaped up in grooves and hollows among the bleached white boulders left by the pyroclastic flow. The collection numbers over 4000 finds (including one human skull). Fragments of animal fossils and flint tools are displayed in cases to allow a close-up view.

 The Casal dè Pazzi Museum attracts mainly family groups and school parties and is equipped with visual aids in the form of illustrated panels and a video for young visitors. Curator Patrizia Gioia has also laid out a “Pleistocene Garden” outside the entrance, planted with some of the typical shrubs and flowers that grew during the period and which have survived into the present day. These include some varieties of roses, orchids and members of the lily family, plus trees like pines, cypresses and the exotic zelkova crenata, which continues to flourish in the Caucasus.

 The second site is situated some twenty-two kilometers to the north of the city, in a green spread of open countryside between Via Aurelia and Via Boccea. Finding it is just about as hard as it is to pronounce its name, so be warned and follow your Sat Nav!

 At first sight, the Polledrara di Cecanibbia Museum is somewhat unprepossessing. The entire site is a grassy slope stretching over 1,200 sq.  A portion is protected by what looks like a large, rustic industrial shed. Once through the door, however, the visual impact is almost overwhelming.

 The vast floor area is literally covered with fossilized remains that have been scientifically dated to 325 - 310,000 years ago. Palaeontologists consider this is to be one of the richest deposits that exists of the remains of Elephas Antiquus - a species of elephant that became extinct some 40,000 years ago, during the last Ice Age.

 “This species wasn't a mammoth,” Coccioni explained. “Its tusks weren't curved like the mammoth's. They were relatively straight. It was related to the Indian elephant we know today, but it was a lot bigger.”

 From the metal gangways that stretch across the site, you look down on a surrealistic landscape of heaped gigantic tusks, jawbones, vertebrae, ribs and skulls. Excavations on the adjacent hillside, begun in 1984, have uncovered over 20,000 animal fossils belonging to ancient species of mammals as well as many primitive stone implements. Fifty tusks belonging to some thirty examples of Elephant antico have been unearthed intact, as well as several skulls and horns of Bue primigenio (primitive ox), along with the fossilized remains of many other animals, birds and small reptiles.

 The position of some of the skeletons has allowed scientists to reconstruct the fate of some of these beasts. The area had become a swamp and one bull elephant became trapped in the mud. Unable to get out, he slowly died. Only then did the hunters move in. It would have been impossible for the little men of the time to tackle such an enormous animal while it was still alive, Seno told us. Over 600 flint knives and scrapers were found around the former carcass to prove that the elephant meat was used for food.  Another predator, however, had had the same idea. The bones of a wolf showed that it ventured near the struggling animal and become trapped in its turn. The dramatic reconstruction of the scene, showing the tribe butchering the dead elephant, is reproduced on a panel along the wall.

INFO:

Museo di Casal Dé Pazzi,Via Egidio Galbani/Via Ciliciano

Tel.06.67103430 - 060608      www.museiincomuneroma.it

La Polledrara di Cecanibbio (prior booking necessary) Tel 06.39967700

www.coopculture.it  archeoroma.beniculturali.it/siti-archaologici/polledrara-cecanibbio

Pianeta Terra www.paleoitalia.org

ms-ft