In 1939, workers at a beachfront hotel south of Rome stumbled upon a sealed cave beneath the property and found a mutilated Neanderthal skull. The discovery at Guattari Cave, near San Felice Circeo, immediately invited dramatic interpretation. A sizable hole in the cranium led paleontologist Alberto Carlo Blanc to conclude that fellow Neanderthals had extracted the brain for ritual cannibalism. For decades that theory held. New evidence has overturned it.
Excavations that began in October 2019 and were made public in recent years have recovered the remains of nine additional Neanderthals, bringing the total number of individuals identified at the site to eleven. The assemblage includes males and females of various ages, among them a young boy and a woman. Eight of the individuals date between 50,000 and 68,000 years ago; one may reach as far back as 100,000 years. Together they form one of the largest and rarest clusters of Neanderthal bones ever found.
The same deposits contain the fossilized remains of long-extinct animals: hyenas, elephants, rhinoceroses, and aurochs, the wild ancestor of modern cattle. Many of the bones, human and animal alike, show signs of burning, cut marks, or clear gnawing. Analysis of those traces has shifted the narrative from ritual cannibalism to predation. “Neanderthals were prey for these animals,” said Mario Rolfo, professor of archaeology at Tor Vergata University. “Hyenas hunted them, especially the most vulnerable, like sick or elderly individuals.” A pack of Pleistocene hyenas appears to have killed the Neanderthals, dragged the bodies into the cave that served as a den or storeroom, and thoroughly scavenged the remains. “Hyenas like munching on bones,” Rolfo noted. “Reality is more banal.”
The cave itself was sealed for tens of thousands of years by an ancient earthquake or landslide, preserving its contents until the accidental discovery in 1939. Systematic work continued for roughly a decade and a half before excavations stopped in the early 1950s. The recent campaign has entered previously unexamined chambers and has already produced a far richer picture of the site’s history. Mauro Rubini, chief anthropologist of the local Culture Ministry, observed that the human skeleton remains “a formidable archive that tells us everything: their age, sex, height, what they ate, their genome, whether they had illnesses, how much they walked and even if they were able to have fun.” Further study of the Guattari bones is expected to yield precisely such data.
Italian Culture Minister Dario Franceschini described the find as “an extraordinary discovery which the whole world will be talking about.” The Culture Ministry confirmed that the eleven individuals “bring the total number of individuals present in the Guattari Cave to 11, confirming it as one of the most significant sites in the world for the history of Neanderthal man.” Neanderthals disappeared from the fossil and genetic record around 40,000 years ago; the Guattari assemblage therefore captures a substantial span of their final chapters in western Eurasia, a region they dominated for roughly 250,000 years.
Local authorities have already begun planning for the site’s future. San Felice Circeo Mayor Giuseppe Schiboni has sought European Union funding to develop archaeological tourism and has expressed interest in establishing a European research center devoted to Neanderthals, complete with virtual-reality experiences. Angelo Guattari, whose father owned the hotel in 1939 and witnessed the first skull’s recovery, hopes the cave will eventually open to visitors. The property itself has been renamed Hotel Neanderthal and is currently for sale.
What began as a single skull and a sensational hypothesis has become a multi-layered archive of predation, extinction, and human presence on the Italian coast. The bones, protected for millennia and now systematically studied with modern methods, continue to rewrite the story of the Neanderthals who once lived—and died—beside the sea.