An exhibition and conference in Florence to understand how our ancestors coped with climate change

TheItalian Institute of Prehistory and Protohistory in Florence is promoting initiatives that provide an opportunity to explore how our ancestors, even thousands of years ago, coped with climate change and extreme weather phenomena. The events, including an exhibition and a study conference, aim to shed light on the adaptation strategies implemented by our ancestors.

The exhibition 170,000 Years Ago at Poggetti Vecchi. Neanderthals and the Challenge of Climate, which can be visited from Oct. 24, 2014 to Jan. 12, 2025 in the Museum of Anthropology and Ethnology and the National Archaeological Museum in Florence, brings to the public’s attention the exceptional artifacts found at the Tuscan prehistoric site of Poggetti Vecchi. This site has preserved for more than 170,000 years the monumental remains of an extinct fauna as well as the oldest man-made wooden tools ever found in Italy and displayed here for the first time, demonstrating how humans adapted to a changing environment on the threshold of the penultimate ice age. Curated by Biancamaria Aranguren, Silvia Florindi, Daniele Federico Maras, Daniela Puzio and Anna Revedin, with contributions from the Region of Tuscany and the Fondazione CR Firenze, the exhibition is in collaboration with the National Archaeological Museum of Florence and the University of Florence’s Sistema Museale d’Ateneo, in agreement with the National Museums Tuscany regional directorate.

The exhibition comes as the culmination of a long research process. Poggetti Vecchi, in the province of Grosseto, rises at the foot of a hill from which springs a hot spring already frequented, 170,000 years ago, by Neanderthals and ancient elephants - up to 4 meters tall and with tusks up to 3 meters long -, now extinct. Beginning with excavations in 2012, a team composed of scholars from the Superintendency, the Italian Institute of Prehistory and Protohistory and various universities determined not only the climatic conditions of the time, at a time when temperatures were gradually getting colder, but also the landscape of the site, which, thanks to the warm vapors and animal presence attracted a human group, as documented not only by numerous stone chippings, but also by boxwood sticks with traces of fireworking preserved remarkably nearly intact. Excavation tools that show for the first time the advance of new technology: the use of fire for woodworking that would become essential to human evolution. The proposed exhibition is organized in two sections: the one at Palazzo Nonfinito aims to enhance the excavation of Poggetti Vecchi through environmental reconstructions, digital technologies and 3-D copies to immerse oneself in that distant world and make it possible for visitors to touch faithful reproductions of the extraordinary wooden finds. The section at the National Archaeological Museum in Florence will present some of the original wooden artifacts, which have never before been exhibited due to their extreme fragility. This is an opportunity to discover the lifestyle of Tuscany’s earliest inhabitants, before the artifacts are secured pending final musealization.

Parallel to the exhibition, the conference Risk and Resource. Prehistoric Communities’ Response to Environmental Challenges, Oct. 24-26 at the Department of Biology, University of Florence. More than 200 scholars, faculty and experts in prehistory and protohistory will participate to discuss the impact of prehistoric populations on the environment and natural resources, the evolution of adaptation tactics, and the strategic importance of geographic areas commonly considered extreme or marginal. Topics such as the mobility of peoples, variations in diet and cultural identity, and the resilience of prehistoric communities will be covered. Through more than 50 talks, the conference will explore how environmental factors, including extremes, have been both a threat and an opportunity, to have triggered innovative responses.

One may legitimately wonder whether, and to what extent, a history of the relationship between human communities and the environment can be reconstructed over such a long period with no written sources. The archaeology of prehistory and protohistory is now a multidisciplinary subject, and in addition to the well-established study of excavated contexts and human-produced artifacts has a plurality of scientific approaches: from geoarchaeology to archaeobotany, from archaeozoology to the archaeology of human remains, from biomolecular archaeology to archaeogenetics. The result is a broad overview of information that allows us to reconstruct the world of our origins and bring to light, through the study of archaeological finds and contexts, but also through laboratory analyses of pollen preserved for millennia, the remains of fauna and microfauna, and ancient DNA, the appearance and development of ancient ecosystems, the flora and fauna that characterized them, and how humanity traversed them, transforming them and transforming itself. This will be the starting point for the talks at the conference: among the case studies, in addition to that of Poggetti Vecchi, ample space will be devoted to Paleolithic and Mesolithic hunter-gatherer societies, but also to early Neolithic agricultural societies, which after the end of the ice ages were able to produce food as well as sustain demographically larger village communities. Alongside situations of adaptation, resilience and innovation there were cases of the collapse of entire cultural systems. Emblematic is that of the Terramare society in the center of the Po Valley in the middle centuries of the 2nd millennium BCE. The area, rich in resources and with a flourishing economy, suffered in the late Bronze Age, between 1200 and 1150 B.C., a productive crisis probably caused by a drier climate and over-exploitation of soils. The change resulted in the collapse of the economic and social system, causing a substantial abandonment of the plains. A dramatic impact that had less impactful consequences in the marginal areas on the neighboring mountains, where the economy and population size had not reached the levels of the lowlands. The Terramare case shows that the consequences of climate change are deeply related to the economic patterns adopted and land use.

“This initiative is a wonderful opportunity to give a concrete sign of the twinning that has united us for several years now with the Italian Institute of Prehistory and Protohistory and to offer the public a sensational opportunity to come into direct contact with objects from a very ancient past,” said Daniele Federico Maras, director of the National Archaeological Museum in Florence. “It is a real honor for us to participate in an experience of meeting what I like to call the ’first Tuscans,’ who still manage to teach us today how to transform a tough environmental challenge into an opportunity to introduce a new sustainable technology that can save the future of humanity. Not coincidentally, the trace of the revolutionary scope of that first technological advancement has remained engraved in the collective memory of our ancestors, through mythology, as is recounted in the exhibition itinerary. The events of these days also bode well for the Museum, which is starting from the very exhibition to relaunch its activities in the phase of major renovation work that will see it busy throughout 2025 and beyond, with the renovation and refitting of most of the exhibition halls.”

“This initiative,” says Marco Benvenuti, president of the Museum System of the Florentine Athenaeum, “represents an example of virtuous collaboration between major cultural institutions in our city. I am very pleased that, to celebrate the seventieth anniversary of the Italian Institute of Prehistory and Protohistory, as part of the Centennial of the University of Florence, the Athenaeum Museum System is hosting digital reconstructions and copies of the exceptional artifacts from the Poggetti Vecchi excavations in a room of the Museum of Anthropology and Ethnology in Palazzo Nonfinito. This fine initiative also reinforces the ancient and historical link between the Museum and the Italian Institute of Prehistory and Protohistory, in the wake of the historical events that, since the early twentieth century, have marked the development precisely in Florence of the disciplines of Human Paleontology.”

“Today, thanks to the development of increasingly sophisticated molecular technologies, it is possible to read genomes of individuals who lived in the past even hundreds of thousands of years ago, such as Neanderthals,” says David Caramelli, director of the Department of Biology at the University of Florence. “Finding out what their genomes tell us not only enriches our knowledge of our evolutionary history, but also allows us to understand how ancient populations could biologically cope with past climatic changes and nature’s challenges.”

“One of the most topical issues at the planetary level concerns the climatic and environmental changes that we are experiencing in recent decades,” explains Professor Cardarelli, professor of prehistory and protohistory at the University of Rome “La Sapienza,” “but considering the issue in a broad time perspective, it is certainly not the first time that humanity has been faced with modifications so relevant to its very survival. Questioning, then, how human communities have responded to climate challenges in different chronological and geographical realities is not only a practice related to our need for knowledge, but can help to understand relevant aspects of the contemporary world. As Jared Diamond teaches us in one of his best-known books, sometimes environmental changes, including human-driven ones, have caused entire social systems to collapse. But in many other cases there has been, on the part of human societies, an adaptive and resilient response, and indeed the critical factor has been the key to important changes and innovations.”

“This exhibition,” the curators conclude, “stems from the need to make scholars as well as the public understand the importance and uniqueness of the materials found at the Poggetti Vecchi site in Grosseto, and consequently the need for them to find a suitable exhibition venue both for their preservation and for a worthy valorization in their area of origin. The fragility of these artifacts will not allow, after this exhibition, a new exhibition other than the definitive one in the location that we hope will soon be identified by the authorities in charge.”

Pictured is a nomadic group in a steppe landscape from the Ice Ages (about 35,000 years ago). Drawing by Tom Björklund

An exhibition and conference in Florence to understand how our ancestors coped with climate change

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