Cave discovered by chance on 24 February 1939 during stone quarrying on the property of Mr Guattari, whose entrance had been sealed by an ancient landslide about 53,000-57,000 years ago. In the innermost chamber, later named the ‘Chamber of Man’, a skull of Homo neanderthalensis was found in exceptional condition, at the centre of a ring of stones that long fuelled the theory of a ritual of brain-eating; this theory has now been scaled back in favour of taphonomic explanations linked to hyenas, which used the cave as a den. Recent excavations between 2019 and 2021 have uncovered further human and animal remains, confirming the international scientific importance of the site, which today can be visited only during special openings organised by the Superintendence.
The cave, made up of several connected caverns, lies at the foot of the eastern end of Mount Circeo, behind the Hotel Neanderthal. The intact preservation of this Mousterian prehistoric site is due to a landslide that blocked its entrance in very remote times. Thanks to a series of fortunate circumstances, we thus have a sort of prehistoric “island”, an environment lived in by Neanderthal man and handed down completely intact for over fifty millennia: the Guattari Cave. It was discovered by chance on 24 February 1939 by workers of Cavaliere Alessandro Guattari who were quarrying rock from Mount Morrone. The leading palaeontologist of the Agro Pontino, Alberto Carlo Blanc, was immediately called to examine the sensational discovery. The floor of the cave was strewn with fossil remains of Pleistocene animals mixed with stones. The material was covered by limestone deposits and lay in its original position, a very rare example of a surface palaeosol from the Ice Age. Excavation of the cave fill revealed, at the base of the ancient surface, a fossil beach with species certainly belonging to the warm interglacial sea. The layers above the beach contained Mousterian pebble tools (for which Blanc coined the name Pontinian) and remains of animals of the last Ice Age: elephant, rhinoceros, hyena, leopard, bear, wolf, fox, wild boar, red deer, aurochs, fallow deer, roe deer and horse. The most extraordinary find was made in the innermost chamber, renamed the Chamber of Man: at the centre of an oval of stones was a fossil skull of Homo neanderthalensis in good condition. Alberto Carlo Blanc, who first analysed it, identified two ancient openings in the skull: one at the foramen magnum and one in the right temporal-orbital area. The place of the find, the type of faunal context, the absence of other remains of the same individual and, above all, the two holes led Blanc to suggest that the skull had been placed at the centre of a magical ritual. Also linked to the ritual was the symmetrical enlargement of the base of the skull, perhaps made to extract the brain in a particular form of cannibalism, similar to that practised in recent times by Melanesian headhunters. The skull, together with the palaeontological finds from the cave and the animal remains from the lower layers, was restudied by American anthropologists who, using the most modern scientific techniques, cast doubt on the ritual interpretation of the Guattari Cave. At the international conference “The fossil man of Monte Circeo. Fifty years of studies on the Neandertals in Latium”, held in Sabaudia in 1989, the American scholars showed that the holes in the skull were made by hyenas and that the evocative Chamber of Man was in fact a carnivore den, more precisely of spotted hyenas.
