 First of all, thank you to the organisers, sorry, for having accepted my contribution to this session and I'm very happy to be here. I only have 15 minutes so I'm going to be as fast as possible. I'm going to start from a little bit far away and precisely from the Sa'ul landmarks, so the Australian and New Guinea landmarks that experienced very early people. Recently, in 2017, there's a publication on Nature, very interesting, that even brings back the date to an incredible 65, around 65,000 BP. And to do that, the modern human, anatomically modern human needed to cross quite big sea parts, which was more than 100 km. And this is just one slide. I go back to our topic very fast because if we go in comparison with what happened in the Mediterranean, which is much smaller sea, much less dangerous even than the Pacific. Ocean, of course in prehistoric times, there is a lot of activity already certified, for example, from 11,000 BP. This is the obsidian from Melos, we found it all around the place. There is also for sure a sea crossing of about 100 km in the early Neolithic between Sicily and Malta, but for example in the Balearic island, there is no tracks of any Neolithic activity. This is just to say that, of course, we are talking about the establishment of regular navigation routes, of course. So it's something that can prove the fact that the Mediterranean was really used as a famous definition of liquid ague. But what happened before the establishment of these regular navigation routes? This is something that I'm going to talk about focusing mainly, of course, on the Sicilian route, and this is my topic for the day. I just want to mention, and I did also, by talking with a colleague one second ago, that at the moment the most plausible and first human occupation of an island in the western part of the Mediterranean is the Sardinian and Corsica sites. There are two actually, they are both discussed in the literature of course, but of course Fontananova, I will talk about that in the second part of my presentation. So now I want to very briefly discuss about what can we try to know about the people of an island without having clear archaeological remains, and there is a very wonderful publication, I think it's a crucial publication from Lepid, a fellow from Cambridge University in 2014. He used the possibility of analyzing a final turnover as a proof of a human people. This is, of course, a proxy for the arrival of hunter-gatherers in a closed environment like an island, maybe, as a possibility to prove the presence of human occupation. This is something that, of course, I will limit, as I said before, only to Cicili and also to the late phase of the Upper Paleolithic. I don't want to talk about Lower Paleolithic or Middle Paleolithic because of course this would eventually take too much time to edit outside the scope of this presentation. So at the last session maximum, around the last session maximum, we have actually, in Cicili, a final turnover. So this might be exactly the case for proving the arrival of humans or human occupation, stable human occupation. There is, though, a problem which is the peculiarity of Sicilian geography. As you well know, of course many of you are actually coming from the island, not all of you, but there is a small strait separating Sicily from the European landmass. It's a so-called Messino strait which in the narrowest point is a little bit more than three kilometers wide. And in that publication that I mentioned one second ago, Lepard actually refuses to discuss about Sicily because he described it as a quasi-insular. So he says like, I'm not talking about Sicily because it's almost not even an island. It was quite right because the publication from 2014 by Antonio and colleagues established, in my opinion, without any doubt, that at least for 1.5 thousand years at the last session maximum Sicily was not an island. So there was a land bridge and so it's true that there was this geographical condition that connected the link bridge, connected Sicily with the Italian landmass. And these are the consequences on our, of course, on the environment. And these consequences have been very precisely investigated also before the land bridge was clearly approved when there is a publication in 2008 from Massime and colleagues. And I will write very briefly to read this sentence. It's going to take too much time. In isolated system no apparent correlation occurs between climatic oscillation and changes of final diversity. On the other hand, and this is our case, if an island is close to the continent and separated by a rather shallow sea corridor, our case, the combined effect of climatically forced dispersal and glacial, austatic controlled formation of land bridges may cause dramatic effects on final diversity and composition. So if we go back to that final turnover that I was mentioning before, as also Massime and colleagues know this, we might justify it more easily by the existence of the land bridge than by the, so to say, responsibility of undergathers. Of course we cannot be sure that undergathers did not play a role in this final turnover, at least there is a second explanation that does not involve human occupation of CC. And we have to take it this into account. So before I go to the second part of the presentation, which as I said before is going to be focused on Fontana Nouvelle, I just wanted to make a small sum up wrap up of what I've been saying so far. So Western and Central Mediterranean seafar and sea crossing activity has been proven to be very slow during the Pleistocene. It's very limited to a few cases, and some of these few cases are actually also doubtful. CC has been proven not to be an island for at least 1.5,000 year around the LGM. This is a very important point for discussing any possibility of a population that involved or not involved the seafar and sea crossing activity. And then this is a direct consequence of the previous point. Around the LGM CC experienced a clear final turnover that has been established by Leopard among others, might be a mark for the stable human occupation. But in this case, as I already said before, there might be also another explanation. So far, I've been talking about Last Glacier Maximum, so around 22,000, 21,000 before present. And I'm sure that many among the audience will be asking like, OK, what about Ribeiro di Fontana Nouvelle? That's a good point. Ribeiro di Fontana Nouvelle has been presented in the literature until a very recent time. Ribeiro di Fontana Nouvelle is the first and most important example of human peopling of an island in the western Mediterranean before the Last Glacier Maximum. I will bring here this very brief example from this best-selling wonderful book by Brodben from 2013, The Making of the Middle Sea, in which he mentioned the site we are talking about, Ribeiro di Fontana Nouvelle, it's very important, unquestionably wider importance, and it does possess one advantage over earlier claims of island occupation in the Mediterranean. It indisputably happened. Even the most recent literature, take it as granted that Fontana Nouvelle was, and still is, a proof of a pre-LGM population of an island in the Mediterranean. Why so important? First of all, because it will be the southernmost Mediterranean site in Europe. Second, because it's going to prove human presence in Sicily before the LGM, this is something that for what I've said so far would be very striking, and then of course will prove an early sea crossing, sea firing in the Mediterranean. I will go kind of fast on that because I don't want to consume all the time that I have. The history of research of this site has been quite peculiar. There has been a first unsystematic excavation conducted by an amateur archaeologist or local novelman. Actually, the findings have been reburied by this man, at least the human and fellow remains, and then they've been excavated in 1949 by the top attendant for the antiquities. This is the remains, and in 1964 this is a very important point for our discussion. Laplace placed the elite industry and attributed it to the Aurignacian before the LGM. So we start with this first attribution. There has been confirmed also in publication during the Hades, and I've been also placed in doubt by some scholars during the 90s, in this case of Parma Nishas. No, of course, that correctly finds the Aurignacian attribution highly problematic, mainly because of the attribution of Aurignacian science in Italy, but also because of the very peculiar characteristic of the litic assemblage. I'm not going to talk about that during this presentation. The turning point somehow when the attribution to the Aurignacian has been this publication from 1996, which added to the interpretation of the litic also another element that has to do with the final composition. Particularly, it's the absence of the ecosystem that might have been read as a proof of a pre-LGM origin of the deposit. The last point in this history of studies is that about ten years ago, is that this site might not be in the final epigraphic etym, and it's Martini and colleagues, they try to give another chronological attribution, which is the epigraphic etym, which is much more likely because in Sicily we have a lot of epigraphic etym. In this case, it would be the first phase of the epigraphic etym. Very good. So as you can see, based on the litic typology and the final remains, this site has been really attributed to a very huge time span with dramatic consequences because if this site is Aurignacian, this means that it is a scenario-changing site. Very good. I had the opportunity together with colleagues to sample the final and human remains at the archaeological museum in Syracuse, and our dates gave us a different scenario, a completely different scenario. We have ten dates that you can see there, both C14 and also calibrated with 95.4% of confidence, so double sigma, and all the dates except one are very compact. It's at 800 years time span, and it's late Mezzolini. So between 9.9 and 9.1 calibrated BP. So for people who are confident, they know the chronology, and it's easy with, for example, Liar F-16-18 in Uzzo, or Molara, individual one, or Oriente in Favignana. So there are some consequences of this chronology. First of all, I have to notice that, and I'm going toward the end, that it's an extraordinary fact that the site with such a peculiar history of research that was already recognized, for example, by Palma di Ciasnola, has been trusted as a solid ground and a paradigm shifter picture. This is a little bit, somehow, too much confidence in this site. So we have to conclude that there is no proof at the moment of our renaissance of people crossing the Pestina Strait and reaching such a southern latitude. There is no proof of Sicily being populated before the LGM. We have one old date, which actually is also a little bit far from the LGM, which is Riparo di Castello, close to Palermo. And then this is something that does not really have much to do with the chronology now, but it's very important as a methodological suggestion that using only typological method of analysis for litty complexes as a dating method might be dangerous, especially in a context like Sicily, where we have all the excavated sites, and most important litty collection have been often subject of a selective process. So this means that, really, this statistical basis might be mined, undermined. So I think I can wrap up what I said so far in these two parts of this presentation. First of all, we cannot be sure that no people in happened and so on. There was no co-passion before the LGM, of course. In the publication of Leopard that I mentioned before, the author makes a very interesting distinction about different types of co-passion, and some of them might also very well not be or have any, how can I say, any remaining in the archeological in the archeological record. So, for example, ephemeral kind of co-passion. But with the data actually in our process, everything points toward a very late colonization of Sicily. What remains as an open question for me at the moment is that did it happen during the LGM when the land bridge was present, which means there was no sea crossing, seafaring involved, or based on the dates actually available, which are much later, did it happen in a moment in which the land bridge was not there, which means, once again, post the question of sea crossing when not even seafaring. Thank you very much.