Altamura Man - this unfortunate adult male (probably in his mid -thirties) was wedged in the narrow space and probably badly injured, he is thought to have starved to death. Over the thousands of years that followed, the body decayed and the remaining bones gradually became incorporated into the stalactites left behind. In a 2015 paper published in the Journal of Human Evolution, it was announced that the fossil was a Neanderthal, and dating of the calcite has revealed that the bones are between 128,000 and 187,000 years