Convener: Raffaele Sardella This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.

Co-Conveners: Saverio Bartolini Lucenti

Since 1990s many discoveries in Georgia (Caucasus), Italy, France and Spain suggest that humans dispersed out of Africa and into Western Europe during the early Pleistocene. In particular, the early Pleistocene vertebrate assemblages from Italy have a historical importance for the definition of a biochronological framework for the Mediterranean region, as well as for other Eurasian areas. In addition, terms like Villafranchian, Galerian and Aurelian come from Italian sites and are still widely used by vertebrate paleontologists interested in the Old World terrestrial faunas. Given its geographical position, the entire Mediterranean region is considered, in different phases of the Pleistocene, a crossroad between Europe and Africa, East and West, and thus a promising region for examining the most likely causes and trajectories of the dispersal of Homo and other vertebrates. During the last two decades, several new fossil sites have been discovered and studied through multidisciplinary approaches also in north and east territories of Europe, providing new valuable data to reconstruct the timing of faunal dispersals, changes in the environmental conditions and the evolution of the terrestrial ecosystems of the Pleistocene in Europe. This session therefore aims to illustrate updated results and share new research in progress (systematics, stratigraphy, biochronology, dating, paleodiets, paleoecology, etc.) for a precise reconstruction of the terrestrial ecosystems during Pleistocene, with a special emphasis to the dispersals of Homo in Europe.

The proceedings of the session will be printed on an international journal. The conveners will submit a proposal to RIPS - BollSPI - Quaternary International