Lamalunga Cave Visitor Center, Altamura

The Lamalunga cave, in the area of Altamura, is characterized by a system of karst cavities and narrow tunnels. It is accessed through a sinkhole about ten meters deep, and then, following a path of about sixty meters, you encounter an extraordinary archaeological find known as the Altamura Man, a fossil skeleton of a man who lived in the Middle-Upper Pleistocene.

The hominid is identified as an adult male (160-165 centimeters); it is intact in its skeletal structure and in an excellent state of preservation. On his skull there are both archaic traits and those morphological transformations, stabilized in Neanderthals, that allow him to be placed in the group of European Middle Pleistocene fossils, between the forms of Homo erectus (400 thousand years) and those of Homo neanderthalensis (85 thousand years), in a transitional phase estimated at about 250 thousand years ago.