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At the beginning of this week I have visited the Museum für Naturkunde in Berlin to collect additional orangutan data for our research project on great apes ecology. In particular, I was looking to the Sumatran orangutans, ecologically and morphologically different from Bornean orangutans, and thus considerate a separate species, Pongo abelii. I need to thank Steffen Bock, the collection manager, who helped me during my stay at the museum. A wonderful natural history museum that I suggest you all

Last week I had the pleasure to attend the 7th Annual Meeting of the European Society for the study of Human Evolution (ESHE) that was held in the beautiful Leiden in the Netherlands. It was a three intensive-days conference with many interesting talks and posters. We had several contributions: Luca Fiorenza, Huynh N. Nguyen, Stefano Benazzi. Macrowear and biomechanical analyses of great ape molars. Almudena Estalrrich, Luca Fiorenza, Ulrike Menz, Antonio Rosas, Ottmar Kullmer. Dental behavior and long-term dietary reconstruction

I have had the pleasure to visit the small, but beautiful, prehistoric museum in Ostuni (Museo Civilta’ Preclassiche della Murgia Meridionale, Apulia, Italy), where it is exposed the original skeleton of a young woman and her fetus, known as the Woman of Ostuni, that is dated to 28,000 years ago. The skeleton represents the oldest example of Paleolithic pregnant human female, who may have died due to problems during the pregnancy. Analysis of the fetal remains was published on Scientific

For the second year, we are carrying an archaeological excavation, coordinated by Prof. Stefano Benazzi, at Torre di Uluzzo near Lecce, in Southern Italy. We are looking at Middle and Upper Palaeolithic deposits with a a focus on the Uluzzian culture, that we still do not know if it was made by Neanderthals or by Homo sapiens.