Unusual morphological features in a presumably Neolithic individual from Riparo della Rossa, Serra San Quirico (Ancona, Italy)

The present study describes human skeletal remains from Riparo della Rossa, a rock shelter in the Marche region (Central Italy). The remains consist of a cranial vault and a few nonarticulatedpostcranial bones, possibly belonging to the same adult individual. As the cranial vault showed some morphological features that are unusual for a modern human (marked prominence of the supraorbital region, very prominent nasal bones and rather high thickness of the vault), an accurate anthropological analysis and quantification of the antiquity of thebones were required. The remains were dated with two different absolute dating methods, AMS 14C and 235U–231Pa non-destructive gamma-ray spectrometry (NDGRS), whichproduced discordant results: the uncalibrated 14C dating produced 5690780 BP for the cranial vault and 6110780 BP for the clavicle; the NDGRS dating produced 10,00073000 BPfor the cranial vault. The sex discriminant morphological characters on the skull are not unequivocal, though the masculine ones appear more evident. The aims of the present paper are: to provide a morphological and metric description of the remains; to interpret their unusual morphological features; to attempt to attribute them to male or female sex and to one of the possible prehistoric cultural groups, according to dating results (Upper Palaeolithic, Mesolithic or Neolithic). The attribution was obtained by a Bayesian procedure taking into account the reliability of the combined information of morphological/metric features and absolute dating results. The results suggest that the Riparo della Rossa remains are best attributed to a male individual of the Neolithic age.