Il popolamento umano della Sicilia: una revisione interdisciplinare

Summary — The question of the human peopling of Sicily and Western Mediterranean shores duringPleistocene times is centred on the reconstruction of human and faunal migration routes and ofthe complex geological dynamics of the Central Mediterranean basin. Even if the common routeof faunal and human movement is considered from North, related to the crossing of Messina straitarea, several authors, on the base of archaeological evidences, hypothesized an earlier peopling and anAfrican provenance through the Sicilian Channel. This hypothesis has been several times explored andmostly rejected, even if diverse palaeontological and especially archaeological findings of Modus 1 and2 artefacts, from Southern Sicily, renew continuously the attention on this potential route. Howevermost Sicilian archaeological evidences are spotty and frequently dubitative, as they lack of stratigraphiccontext. Direct anthropological data are scarce and relative only to the Upper Palaeolithic and indicatea H. sapiens migration from Italian mainland. Nevertheless, palaeontological and palaeogeographicdata do not exclude the possibility of a Middle Pleistocene human peopling. We faced the problemthrough diverse perspectives, on the main intent of a critical revision of all the available data frompalaeontology, archaeology, palaeogeography and physical anthropology. We propose a critic discussionof the industrial evidences, the georeference of lithic and faunal retrieval sites during Middle Pleistoceneand a tentative palaeogeographic reconstruction of Middle Pleistocene coastal lines of Sicily on thebase of the georeferred sites. The state of art do not exclude the possibility of several sporadic humanpeopling related to the Messina Strait accessibility since the Middle Pleistocene. A pulsating trend ofdispersal and extinction characterized humans in Sicily at least until Mesolithic transition.