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Museum of Man of Val Rosna

The discovery

A museum that, although not currently hosting original artifacts, manages to tell the story in an engaging and accurate way thanks to nine rooms where reconstructions and faithful copies of how the objects must have been at the time are displayed, and films are shown that philologically and evocatively recreate the atmospheres and gestures of 14,000 years ago. Other films give voice to the protagonists of the discovery, the excavations, and the investigations to recount firsthand the phases of the archaeological research. It tells us about the first humans who populated the Alpine chain and, through the burial of the Man of Val Rosna, who lived 14,000 years ago, shows us the life and beliefs of the hunter-gatherer Sapiens who began to frequent the Alps in the final phases of the last glaciation.

It was 1987 when Aldo Villabruna found, at a construction site in the municipality of Sovramonte at the confluence of the Rosna and Cismon streams, remains of human bones and an arrowhead dating back to the Epigravettian, the last phase of the Upper Paleolithic.

The news astonished the scientific world and the University of Ferrara began an excavation campaign that brought to light three shelters that made use of the rock face, frequented several times during Prehistory. The first occupation, dated to 14,000 years ago, is when the burial of a 25/30-year-old hunter covered by painted stones took place: one of the oldest known forms of funerary art.

The burial

The inhumed individual, incomplete from the middle of the femurs down, was laid out stretched and supine in a deep pit with the body reclined to the left, towards the wall of the shelter. On his left forearm was placed a pouch containing a bone point decorated with notches, a backed knife, a blade and a flint core, a siltstone pebble used as a retoucher, and a lump of resinous substance, possibly mastic.

The pit was filled in and covered with stones collected from the surrounding streams, some of which were painted with red ochre.

Art and Rituality

The four painted stones that covered the burial consist of three large pebbles placed with the painted side facing the deceased, depicting respectively a dancing man, some linear bands, and two deer antlers. Another flat stone, with the painted side facing upwards, shows in a stylized way a hyper-anthropic figure, that is, a man with many arms, probably indicating great strength.

This painting, visible to those entering, was a real tombstone indicating the presence of the burial; the same purpose was probably served by the six ochre bands still visible on the shelter walls corresponding to the tomb.

The first patient for the first dentist

The Man of Val Rosna boasts the oldest known case of dental treatment among our ancestors: the removal of a cavity from a wisdom tooth.

An exceptional discovery that has gone around the world and has been published in major international scientific journals, to which the museum itinerary gives the prominence it deserves.