The Gravettian Fossil Hominids of Italy - Manolis - 1996

This paper gives an outline of the Gravettian Italian population and the results of the statistical analysis of the whole Gravettian European population. It is worth mentioning that there are great similarities in the burial customs (primary burials, ritual customs i.e. covering the head, pelvis and the feet with red ochre, putting ornaments - diadems on the dead's head constructed namely by several hundreds of perforated marine or land shells and sometimes by canines of the common hunted wild animals as reindeer, mammoth etc.) between the two European Gravettian centres (Italy and Moravia). The anthropological analysis showed that there is a homogeneous population with a certain individual variability. This can also be confirmed theoretically by the hypothesis of Bocquet-Appel (1985) about the genetic exchange between small UPL populations in order to avoid extinction. From a phylogenetic point of view we can infer that the Gravettian population definitely belongs to the descendants of the early Homo sapiens sapiens in Europe. This can be stated because there has been a debate about modern human origins in the recent decades. There are several hypotheses for the early UPL population in different areas of Europe, whether these populations are descendants of the Neanderthals or not (Smith 1982, Bräuer, Rimbach 1990, Frayer 1986, Hublin 1987, Thoma 1974, Henke 1989, 1992, Gambier 1989, Stringer 1984).

Keywords

Upper Palaeolithic - Gravettian - Italian fossils - Homo s. sapiens remains

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