The Man of Altamura

In 1993 cavers went into a karst cave outside Altamura and found a Neanderthal: an almost complete skeleton, sealed into the calcite, more than a hundred thousand years old. He is still in there. He was never taken out.

You cannot go into the cave. The Man of Altamura stayed where he fell, which is the best part of the story. On the edge of town a disused quarry holds thousands of dinosaur footprints, pressed into Cretaceous mud and turned to stone. There is far more time under the Murgia than the landscape lets on.