Grotta Paglicci Paglicci Cave
Country Country A country is a region legally identified as a distinct entity in political geography. A country may be an independent sovereign state or one that is occupied by another state, as a non-sovereign or formerly sovereign political division, or a geographic region associated with a previously... :	Italy Italy Italy , officially the Italian Republic languages]] under the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages. In each of these, Italy's official name is as follows:;;;;;;;;), is a unitary parliamentary republic in South-Central Europe. To the north it borders France, Switzerland, Austria and...
Region:	Apulia Apulia Apulia is a region in Southern Italy bordering the Adriatic Sea in the east, the Ionian Sea to the southeast, and the Strait of Òtranto and Gulf of Taranto in the south. Its most southern portion, known as Salento peninsula, forms a high heel on the "boot" of Italy. The region comprises , and...
Province:	Foggia Province of Foggia The Province of Foggia is a province in the Apulia region of Italy.This province is also known as Capitanata, originally Catapanata, because during the Middle Ages it was governed by a catapan, as part of the Catapanate of Italy...
Municipality:	Rignano Garganico Rignano Garganico Rignano Garganico is a town and comune of the province of Foggia in the Apulia region of southern Italy.-Geography:Apricena, Foggia, San Marco in Lamis, San Severo and San Giovanni Rotondo are neighbouring towns....
Locality:	Paglicci
Coordinates Geographic coordinate system A geographic coordinate system is a coordinate system that enables every location on the Earth to be specified by a set of numbers. The coordinates are often chosen such that one of the numbers represent vertical position, and two or three of the numbers represent horizontal position... :	41°41′00"N 15°35′00"E
Time zone Time zone A time zone is a region on Earth that has a uniform standard time for legal, commercial, and social purposes. In order for the same clock time to always correspond to the same portion of the day as the Earth rotates , different places on the Earth need to have different clock times... :	CET Central European Time Central European Time , used in most parts of the European Union, is a standard time that is 1 hour ahead of Coordinated Universal Time . The time offset from UTC can be written as +01:00... , UTC+1 UTC+1 UTC+01:00 is an identifier for a time offset from UTC of +01:00. In ISO 8601 the associated time would be written as .This time is used in:*Central European Time*West Africa Time*Western European Summer Time**British Summer Time**Irish Standard Time...
Type:	Karst cave Karst topography Karst topography is a geologic formation shaped by the dissolution of a layer or layers of soluble bedrock, usually carbonate rock such as limestone or dolomite, but has also been documented for weathering resistant rocks like quartzite given the right conditions.Due to subterranean drainage, there...
Length Length In geometric measurements, length most commonly refers to the longest dimension of an object.In certain contexts, the term "length" is reserved for a certain dimension of an object along which the length is measured. For example it is possible to cut a length of a wire which is shorter than wire... :	? m
Elevation Elevation The elevation of a geographic location is its height above a fixed reference point, most commonly a reference geoid, a mathematical model of the Earth's sea level as an equipotential gravitational surface .... :	590 amsl Above mean sea level The term above mean sea level refers to the elevation or altitude of any object, relative to the average sea level datum. AMSL is used extensively in radio by engineers to determine the coverage area a station will be able to reach...
Depth:	? m
Website Website A website, also written as Web site, web site, or simply site, is a collection of related web pages containing images, videos or other digital assets. A website is hosted on at least one web server, accessible via a network such as the Internet or a private local area network through an Internet...	Grotta Paglicci

Paglicci cave is an archeological site situated near Rignano Garganico

Rignano Garganico

Rignano Garganico is a town and comune of the province of Foggia in the Apulia region of southern Italy.-Geography:Apricena, Foggia, San Marco in Lamis, San Severo and San Giovanni Rotondo are neighbouring towns....

, Apulia

Apulia

Apulia is a region in Southern Italy bordering the Adriatic Sea in the east, the Ionian Sea to the southeast, and the Strait of Òtranto and Gulf of Taranto in the south. Its most southern portion, known as Salento peninsula, forms a high heel on the "boot" of Italy. The region comprises , and...

, southern Italy

Italy

Italy , officially the Italian Republic languages]] under the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages. In each of these, Italy's official name is as follows:;;;;;;;;), is a unitary parliamentary republic in South-Central Europe. To the north it borders France, Switzerland, Austria and...

. The cave, discovered in the 1950s, is the most important cave of Gargano

Gargano

Gargano is a historical and geographical Italian sub-region situated in Apulia, consisting of a wide isolated mountain massif made of highland and several peaks and forming the backbone of the Gargano Promontory projecting into the Adriatic Sea. The high point is Monte Calvo at . Most of the upland...

.

Description

In the cave, situated near Rignano Garganico

Rignano Garganico

Rignano Garganico is a town and comune of the province of Foggia in the Apulia region of southern Italy.-Geography:Apricena, Foggia, San Marco in Lamis, San Severo and San Giovanni Rotondo are neighbouring towns....

, there are more than 45,000 individual find

Find

In Unix-like and some other operating systems, find is a command-line utility that searches through one or more directory trees of a file system, locates files based on some user-specified criteria and applies a user-specified action on each matched file...

s, including Paleolithic

Paleolithic

The Paleolithic Age, Era or Period, is a prehistoric period of human history distinguished by the development of the most primitive stone tools discovered , and covers roughly 99% of human technological prehistory...

 tools, human and animal bones. They are currently housed in Rignano Garganico's Museum.

The cave contains also some Paleolithic mural paintings, depicting horses and handprints. Images of goats, cows, a serpent, a nest with eggs, and a hunting scene have also been found engraved on bone.

Two human skeletons have been found as well, belonging to a boy and a young woman, both wearing deer bone or teeth ornaments.

Paglicci cave contains the earliest Aurignacian

Aurignacian

The Aurignacian culture is an archaeological culture of the Upper Palaeolithic, located in Europe and southwest Asia. It lasted broadly within the period from ca. 45,000 to 35,000 years ago in terms of conventional radiocarbon dating, or between ca. 47,000 and 41,000 years ago in terms of the most...

 and Gravettian

Gravettian

thumb|right|Burins to the Gravettian culture.The Gravettian toolmaking culture was a specific archaeological industry of the European Upper Palaeolithic era prevalent before the last glacial epoch. It is named after the type site of La Gravette in the Dordogne region of France where its...

 remains of Italy, dated to c. 34,000 and 28,000 BP

BP

BP p.l.c. is a global oil and gas company headquartered in London, United Kingdom. It is the third-largest energy company and fourth-largest company in the world measured by revenues and one of the six oil and gas "supermajors"...

 (uncalibrated).

Risk of collapse

In 2008 it archaeologists made a plea to the Prime Minister, Silvio Berlusconi to dedicate funds to save the cave, that is in risk of imminent collapse.

Relevance in population genetics

In 2008, a scientific team led by David Caramelli tested human remains from Paglicci cave (Paglicci 23

Paglicci 23

Paglicci 23 is the name for human remains found in Paglicci Cave in Apulia, Italy that have been dated to 28,000 years Before Present.In 2008, a scientific team led by David Caramelly tested Paglicci 23 and found that mtDNA sequences corresponding to positions...

) dated 28,000 BP and found that the individual had the human mitochondrial haplogroup H

Haplogroup H (mtDNA)

In human mitochondrial genetics, Haplogroup H is a human mitochondrial DNA haplogroup that likely originated in Southwest Asia 25,000-30,000 YBP.-Origin:...

, specifically the rather common Cambridge Reference Sequence

Cambridge Reference Sequence

The Cambridge Reference Sequence for human mitochondrial DNA was first published in 1981 leading to the initiation of the human genome project.A group under Dr...

. The result was exhaustively tested for possible contamination and replicated in a separate test.