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An article from L'Unione Estate - Unione Sarda
ENGLISH DIARY TUESDAY 30 JULY 2002
Bone Deposit from 100,000 Years Ago Under the Sea
The Mystery of the Grotta dei Cervi
Try to image the spectacular bay of Porto Conte, without the sea and the coast line pushed out bout nine kilometres. There would be a vast praire dominated by the two giant promontories of Capo Caccia and Punta Giglio. This "Jurassic" landscape is the context for the origin of the Grotta dei Cervi (Deers Cave), a submerged ravine which hold a fossil deposit of bones of the sardinia deer. Skulls jawbones, femors, horns, all miraculously fossilized in the cobalt blue of the Alghero sea. This is a journey into the ancient heart of the "Giglio" to find an underwater marvel.
The Grotto of the "Cervi" is one of the most interesting in Europe for palaeontologist. At the time it was discovered (during an ordinary tourist dive in 1995), in the rocks smoothed by the sea, had lain untouched for many thousand of years. Regarding the origin of this incredibl deer cemetery, there is a little that can be said with certainty. How the animals ended up in the half submerged cave, and above all when, remains unknow. It was discovered by a diving enthusiasts from Alghero.
Marco Busdraghi, a diving instructor and tech nical expert at Adventure Diving Alghero, described the emotions of the important discovery. The Grotta di Punta Giglio was best know for its large groupers and beautiful corvines (Sciena umbra - Brown meagre) wich inhabit these ravines. "There are three levels" the diver continued, a part submerged with access of less than five metres along a passage and a wider salon. There already we encontered the first bones and the first deposit of deer skeletons. A second room," he added, "connected to the surface and thus supplied with air, features a terrace off to one side where one can arrive by walking through waters which are knee-deep.
There is a small lake inside to accomodate divers. Where it is possible to take off diving tanks, and with wetsuits and mask, enter the other room in which the bones, fossilised by the constant drip of water, where found. Lights were pointed toward the walls and the deposit of Sardinian deer bones immediately appeared ". According to an initial study, the cemetery was formed with the fall of the deer from the crivice above around 300 thousand years ago. If it is possible even if this explanation appears in be somewhat unlikely.
It is not new that the walley, with the sea and the coast line many kilometres away was also populated by numerous exemplares of the dwarf deer. That which today is an interestng underwater grotto in the sea around the Giglio, in the far past was a refuge for humans and there, in the cave of the bones, was perhaps a species of rubbish tip, where hominids threw the lunch scraps. Who knows? Fabrizio Antonioli of ENEA has looked after the Grotta dei Cervi, since '97.
At the moment however the results of the analyses are still to arrive. For some years the superintendent has forbidden diving in the cave. This is a worthy sacrifice, as long as it is not an end itself, seeing as the fascinating mystery of the Grotta dei Cervi is a far from being revealed.
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