Macaca ulna from new excavations at the Notarchirico Acheulean site (Middle Pleistocene, Venosa, southern Italy)

The Notarchirico site, discovered in 1979, has yielded a 7-m thick sequence of fluvial sediments within eleven archaeological levels. The early excavations yielded a rich fossil sample, including a hominin femur fragment in the upper part of the sequence (level a). The faunal assemblage, mainly collected from the upper part of the sedimentary succession, was attributed to the Isernia faunal unit. 40Ar/39Ar ages and electron spin resonance dates have revised the chronology of the entire sedimentary sequence and constrained between ca. 610 and 675 ka all the archaeological levels from the upper part of the sequence, excavated by M. Piperno in the 1980s. Since 2016, a new excavation campaign was initiated at Notarchirico. New fieldwork focusing on the unknown base of the sequence permitted the team to recognize four additional units (G, H, I, and J), all older than 668 ± 6 ka. The 40Ar/39Ar ages calculated for levels I and J (695.2 ± 6.2 ka and 690.3 ± 5.8 ka, respectively) are indistinguishable, suggesting a rapid deposition of the mainly fluvial sediments during MIS 17 and the transition to MIS 16 (Moncel et al., 2020). In this paper a fossil macaque from recent fieldwork at Notarchirico (Venosa basin, southern Italy), which represents the southernmost and easternmost occurrence of Macaca in the Italian fossil record, is described for the first time.