Road construction near Isernia in 1979 sliced straight into an open-air butchering camp roughly 600,000 years old, the oldest major trace of human presence anywhere in Italy, where early hominins had processed the carcasses of bison, elephant and rhinoceros alongside crude stone tools.
Rather than excavate and remove everything, archaeologists built the museum directly over the dig, so bones and tools sit in the same clay where they were dropped, visible from suspended walkways above the actual excavation surface. A single child's tooth, found among the debris, remains one of the few direct human traces from a site otherwise made almost entirely of the animals people ate.
