The Lamalunga cave is an archaeological site near Altamura, in the province of Bari, known as the place where the Altamura Man was found, a Neanderthal skeleton dating back more than a hundred thousand years.
What to see
It is a karst structure in the area of the Murge alte, a setting of lame, shaft-like sinkholes and a collapse sinkhole called the Pulo di Altamura; the landscape is one of arid stony ground and almost bare of vegetation. The outcropping rock is the Calcare di Altamura, of the middle-upper Cretaceous, and the cover above the cave is never more than 25-30 metres thick. The shape of the cave suggests that it originally had several entrances, now reduced to one; karst shafts of this kind often became natural traps for animals and people.
Many animal remains lie on the floor, mostly deer: the best-represented species is the fallow deer, followed by the red deer, while a few remains belong to equids, hyenas, wolf and bovines. The skeleton of the Altamura Man seems, according to the sources, to have dragged itself, with a fractured radius and shoulder blade, to the end of a narrow tunnel, perhaps looking for a way out. It lies in a small chamber called the Abside dell'Uomo, at the north-western end of the karst system, reachable only with caving techniques; the skull is cemented upside down in the curtain of speleothems.
Visiting
The cave lies in the Murge alte, near Altamura. The sources consulted mention a visitor centre for the Lamalunga cave and a Museo dell'Uomo di Altamura; hours and access arrangements are not given and should be checked. The Abside chamber, where the skeleton lies, is reachable only with caving techniques.
Our editors' tip
The cave was discovered in 1989 by cavers of the Centro Altamurano Ricerche Speleologiche (CARS), who stopped at the first chamber because a plug of mud seemed to close it off. In 1991 a draught coming from the other side of the plug showed that there was more; after about two years of digging a tunnel, the main gallery was first explored on 26 September 1993. On 7 October 1993 Lorenzo Di Liso, a member of the CAI of Bari, crept into one of the two passages of the east branch and at the end found the bone deposit with a skull clearly human; that evening the images were viewed at the CARS headquarters by three anthropologists of the University of Bari, and the next morning, once the Soprintendenza had been alerted, the anthropologist Eligio Vacca went down into the cave.
