Re-examining the earliest evidence of human presence in western Europe: New dating results from Pirro Nord (Italy)

We present the results of the first dating study of site P13 at Pirro Nord, Italy, which documents some of the earliest evidence for hominin presence in western Europe. Our multi-technique dating approach is based on a combination of palaeomagnetism, electron spin resonance (ESR), thermally-transferred optically stimulated luminescence (TT-OSL) and combined U-series/ESR applied to both fossil material and host sediment, which provides ages ranging from 627 ± 59 to 1006 ± 126 ka, and clustering around 0.8 Ma. One additional fossil tooth collected from the nearby P10 site also returns an age within this range. Ordinarily, this outcome would naturally lend itself to the straightforward conclusion that Pirro Nord has a late Early Pleistocene age of ∼0.8 Ma. However, this interpretation is complicated by the fact that these numerical dating results are in contradiction with the biochronological evidence, which suggests a much older age on the order of 1.3–1.7 Ma.