Equus caballus, cranium, hemandible and sacrum

Bones of Equus caballus coming from a funnel-shaped cavity in a pietra leccese stone quarry, which was identified as a “cave”, although it was a “ventarola”, destroyed during the stone extraction process. The finds refer to the cranium, damaged in the occipital, nasal and right maxillary part and with second pre-molars erupting, to the hemimandible, broken in the front part, and to the sacrum of a young specimen.  This large wild equidae spread through Italy during the middle Pleistocene period and became extinct between the end of the Pleistocene and the beginning of the Holocene period. The presence of mammoth remains in the deposit of the ventarola of Cardamone provides a post quem term for dating the filling, considering that the presence in the Italian peninsular of this Siberian Pachyderm was not before the first Würmian acme (60,000 years).