Dental anthropology, paleobiology, and environment. An example from archaeologically controlled contexts in central Italy.

In RIVISTA DI ANTROPOLOGIA, suppl. vol. 76 (1998

The Casal de' Pazzi archaic parietal: comparative analysis of new fossil evidence from the late Middle Pleistocene of Rome

A fossilized fragment of human parietal bone has been recently recovered from the lowest layer of the Casal de' Pazzi fluvial deposit (stratigraphically dated at about 200-250 ky BP). The fossil presents characters-i.e., thickness, degree and development of curvature, type of endocranial vascularization-which distinguish it from the corresponding cranial regions of both Homo erectus and anatomically modern Homo sapiens. While a morphological orientation towards Neanderthal characters can be considered, the affinities of the Casal de' Pazzi parietal are primarily with other late Middle Pleistocene specimens. The authors conclude that the Casal de' Pazzi human find can be assigned to the "archaic Homo sapiens" group falling within the European pre-Neanderthal range. Its particular morphology constitutes new evidence of human evolution from the geographical area of Rome. © 1990

Large Deviation Approaches for the Numerical Computation of the Hitting Probability for Gaussian Processes

We state large deviations for small time of a pinned n-conditional Gaussian process, i.e. the bridge of a Gaussian process conditioned to stay in n fixed points at n fixed past instants, by letting all the past monitoring instants to depend on the small parameter going to 0. Differently from what already developed in Caramellino and Pacchiarotti (Adv Appl Probab 40:424–453, 2008), this procedure is able to catch the dependence on the past observations. We apply the results to numerical experiments that involve the fractional Brownian motion, for the computation of the hitting probability through Monte Carlo methods