![]() The physical-chemical analysis of the archaeological material from the Palaeolithic site, and of the modern bacteriogenic iron sediments from two close springs gave consistent results even after heat treatment. Samples of the ochraceous archaeological deposit, overlying a large burial site, were analysed ac- cording to current methods of physical analysis and SEM highlighting a matrix of bacterial structures and a chemical composition coherent with biogenic productions. Here we describe the earliest case of archaeological use of ferrous pigment produced by iron-oxidising bacteria (FeOB), the first identified in a European Epigravettian (late Upper Palaeolithic) layer, at the San Teodoro site in Sicily, Italy. recently been described in a late Holocene archaeological horizon of the American continent. The use of a biogenic ochraceous pigment and its manipulation has. ![]() The mineralogical and chemical composition of the pigments allowed defining, in most cases, their inorganic origin, which were then used after a limited transformation and manipulation. The use of iron pigments is well documented in the archaeological horizons of the different parts of the world since the Middle Pleistocene. Additionally, aDNA analyses indicate that this Upper Palaeolithic dog lineage from Italy may have contributed to the genetic diversity of living dogs. The genetic affinity between the Palaeolithic dogs from southern Italy and contemporaneous ones found in Germany also suggest that these animals were an important common adjunct during the Late Glacial, when strong cultural diversification occurred between the Mediterranean world and European areas north of the Alps. This unambiguously documents one of the earliest occurrence of domesticates in the Upper Palaeolithic of Europe and in the Mediterranean. Our combined molecular and morphological analyses of fossil canid remains from the sites of Grotta Paglicci and Grotta Romanelli, in southern Italy, attest of the presence of dogs at least 14,000 calibrated years before present. For these reasons, the spatiotemporal context of the early domestication of dogs is hotly debated. Furthermore, the natural occurrence of some of these characters in Late Pleistocene wolf populations and the time it took from the onset of traits related to domestication to their prevalence remain indefinite. The identification of the earliest dogs is challenging because of the absence and/or mosaic pattern of morphological diagnostic features in the initial phases of the domestication process. The present results add evidence to the view that these specimens could represent incipient Paleolithic dogs that were involved in daily activities of European Upper Paleolithic forager groups. It indicates that putative Upper Paleolithic dogs may represent a discrete canid group with morphological signs of domestication (a relatively shorter skull and wider palate and braincase) that distinguish them from sym-patric Pleistocene wolves. Putative Paleolithic dogs are classified with high accuracies (87.5 and 100.0%, cross-validated) and randomization experiment suggests that these classification rates cannot be exclusively explained by the small and uneven sample sizes of reference groups. We evaluated morphological differences between 96 specimens of the 4 a priori reference groups (8 putative Paleolithic dogs, 41 recent northern dogs, 7 Pleisto-cene wolves, and 40 recent northern wolves) using discriminant analysis based on 5 ln-transformed raw and allometrically size-adjusted cranial measurements. In this study, we reanalyzed a data set of large canid skulls using unbalanced-and balanced-randomized discriminant analyses to assess whether the putative Paleolithic dogs are morphologically unique or whether they represent a subsample of the wolf morpho-population. ![]() Some authors questioned this early dog domestication claiming that the putative (EUP) Paleolithic dogs fall within the morphological range of recent wolves. The antiquity of the wolf/dog domestication has been recently pushed back in time from the Late Upper Paleolithic (14,000 years ago) to the Early Upper Paleolithic (EUP 36,000 years ago). ![]()
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