Grotta Romanelli (Southern Italy, Apulia). Legacies and issues in excavating a key site for the Pleistocene of the Mediterranean

Grotta Romanelli, located on the Adriatic coast of southern Apulia (Italy), is considered a key site for the Mediterranean Pleistocene for its archaeological and palaeontological contents. The site, discovered in 1874, was re-evaluated only in 1900, when P. E. Stasi realised that it contained the first evidence of the Palaeolithic in Italy. Starting in 1914, G. A. Blanc led a pioneering excavation campaign, for the first-time using scientific methods applied to systematic palaeontological and stratigraphical studies. Blanc proposed a stratigraphic framework for the cave. Different dating methods (C-14 and U/Th) were used to temporally constrain the deposits. The extensive studies of the cave and its contents were mostly published in journals with limited distribution and access, until the end of the 1970s, when the site became forgotten. In 2015, with the permission of the authorities, a new excavation campaign began, led by a team from Sapienza University of Rome in collaboration with IGAG CNR and other research institutions. The research team had to deal with the consequences of more than 40 years of inactivity in the field and the combined effect of erosion and legal, as well as illegal, excavations. In this paper, we provide a database of all the information published during the first 70 years of excavations and highlight the outstanding problems and contradictions between the chronological and geomorphological evidence, the features of the faunal assemblages and the limestone artefacts

The Hippopotamus remains from the latest Early Pleistocene site of Cava Redicicoli (Rome, central Italy)

The Quaternary record of hippopotamuses is extremely abundant, yet there are still conflicting opinions about their systematics and evolution. The main diagnostic characters of fossils and extant hippopotamuses are recorded in the skulls, while the distinct morphological features between species are less evident in dental and postcranial remains. When hippopotamus skulls are not available, taxonomic identification is often chronologically-based. Herein are described for the first time the hippopotamus remains of the historical museum collections from the latest Early Pleistocene site of Cava Redicicoli, housed in the Museo Universitario di Scienze della Terra, Dipartimento di Scienze della Terra, Sapienza Università di Roma and Istituto Italiano di Paleontologia Umana, Anagni. This material, although formally never morphologically studied, has been referred in the literature either to Hippopotamus antiquus (considering Hippopotamus major as a synonym of H. antiquus) or to Hippopotamus ex gr. antiquus. Morphological and biometric comparisons with other Pleistocene hippopotamuses permit to attribute the studied material to Hippopotamus cf. antiquus. Biometric analysis of teeth and complete postcranial bones shows that the size of fossil hippopotamuses is quite variable, with the largest dimension for the European fossils recorded from the Villafranchian and the Epivillafranchian. The rich sample from the Cava Redicicoli provides new data regarding the morphological and biometric variability of this group during the large faunal renewal that occurred during the Early-Middle Pleistocene transition

Travelling solitons in the parametrically driven nonlinear Schroedinger equation

We show that the parametrically driven nonlinear Schroedinger equation has wide classes of travelling soliton solutions, some of which are stable. For small driving strengths nonpropogating and moving solitons co-exist while strongly forced solitons can only be stably when moving sufficiently fast.Comment: The paper is available as the JINR preprint E17-2000-147(Dubna, Russia) and the preprint of the Max-Planck Institute for the Complex Systems mpipks/0009011, Dresden, Germany. It was submitted to Physical Review

Ponderomotive Control of Quantum Macroscopic Coherence

It is shown that because of the radiation pressure a Schr\"odinger cat state can be generated in a resonator with oscillating wall. The optomechanical control of quantum macroscopic coherence and its detection is taken into account introducing new cat states. The effects due to the environmental couplings with this nonlinear system are considered developing an operator perturbation procedure to solve the master equation for the field mode density operator.Comment: Latex,22 pages,accepted by Phys.Rev.

Late Early to late Middle Pleistocene medium-sized deer from the Italian Peninsula. Implications for taxonomy and biochronology

The taxonomy of Quaternary medium-sized deer from Europe rests mainly on antler morphology, while adequate dental and postcranial diagnostic features are lacking. When complete antlers are not available, the taxonomic identifications are often attempted on chronological ground. A considerable number of mostly unpublished craniodental and postcranial remains of fallow deer from selected Italian sites from the late Early Pleistocene to the late Middle Pleistocene is here presented and discussed. The aim of this work is to test the validity of the diagnostic characters proposed in literature and to explore the variability of the fallow deer taxa. In addition, the analysis of the two reference samples from Riano and Ponte Molle allows to refine the features of Dama clactoniana. Finally, biometric comparison has been performed in order to investigate possible oscillations across time and/or differences among taxa

Cuon alpinus (Pallas, 1811) from the Late Pleistocene site of Ingarano (Foggia, Southern Italy) and insights on the Eurasian middle to Late Pleistocene record

In this study, we report for the first time the presence of Cuon alpinus from the Late Pleistocene site of Ingarano (Foggia, southern Italy), represented by an right upper first molar. Considering the intricate and debated taxonomy of fossil dholes, our comparative analyses on dental samples (P4, M1, and M1) of the extant and Middle to Late Pleistocene dholes from Europe, has been performed evidencing a relevant degree of morphological variability and a biometric uniformity of the considered teeth. Our results indicate the lack of clear morphological and biometric features for a reliable teeth-based classification of fossil dholes, questioning the validity of the fossil taxa currently proposed in the literature. Finally, to avoid the propagation of taxonomically questionable species, we suggest to refer all the Middle to Late Pleistocene material to Cuon alpinus

Multistable Pulse-like Solutions in a Parametrically Driven Ginzburg-Landau Equation

It is well known that pulse-like solutions of the cubic complex Ginzburg-Landau equation are unstable but can be stabilised by the addition of quintic terms. In this paper we explore an alternative mechanism where the role of the stabilising agent is played by the parametric driver. Our analysis is based on the numerical continuation of solutions in one of the parameters of the Ginzburg-Landau equation (the diffusion coefficient $c$), starting from the nonlinear Schr\"odinger limit (for which $c=0$). The continuation generates, recursively, a sequence of coexisting stable solutions with increasing number of humps. The sequence "converges" to a long pulse which can be interpreted as a bound state of two fronts with opposite polarities.Comment: 13 pages, 6 figures; to appear in PR

Creating Metastable Schrodinger Cat States

We propose a scheme using feedback to generate a macroscopic quantum superposition of coherent states in an optical cavity mode which experiences very little decoherence (due to dissipation)

Soliton back-action evading measurement using spectral filtering

We report on a back-action evading (BAE) measurement of the photon number of fiber optical solitons operating in the quantum regime. We employ a novel detection scheme based on spectral filtering of colliding optical solitons. The measurements of the BAE criteria demonstrate significant quantum state preparation and transfer of the input signal to the signal and probe outputs exiting the apparatus, displaying the quantum-nondemolition (QND) behavior of the experiment.Comment: 5 pages, 5 figure