article_snippet.sent: Over the thousands of years that followed, the body decayed and the remaining bones gradually became incorporated into the stalactites left behind by water dribbling down the cave walls.
article_snippet.sent: First discovered in 1993, the skeleton - nicknamed 'Altamura Man' - has provoked debate among anthropologists partly due to the difficulties in studying the skeleton as it had become part of the cave walls.
article_snippet.sent: However, few could agree on whether the skeleton belonged to a Neanderthal or a modern human, or how long it had been down there.
article_snippet.sent: But after taking a tiny part of the skeleton's shoulder bone, researchers at the Sapienza University of Rome, University of Firenze and Newcastle University have been able to answer the questions.
article_snippet.sent: researchers at the Sapienza University of Rome, University of Firenze and Newcastle University found mitochondrial DNA researchers at the Sapienza University of Rome, University of Firenze and Newcastle University extracted from the shoulder bone matched that of other Neanderthal skeletons.
article_snippet.sent: Uranium-thorium dating techniques has also revealed that the skeleton appeared there between 172,000 and 130,000 years ago, during a period when ice sheets were expanding significantly from out of Antarctica and Greenland.
article_snippet.sent: Giorgio Manzi, one of the palaeoanthropologists leading the study from the Sapienza University of Rome, said:  '
article_snippet.sent: We hope that the skeleton will become a key for a virtuous combination of scientific research, protection of We heritage and the skeleton promotion and development.'
article_snippet.sent: Researchers have, up until now, held off from excavating the remains (above) as Researchers believed the remains ( would cause irreparable damage to the skeleton but an early studies had suggested the skeleton had some Neanderthal features .
article_snippet.sent: Over time, an adult male bones fell where had died, with some still lodged in the cave gap and were eventually absorbed into the walls of Cave.
article_snippet.sent: Cave explorers then stumbled across his bones in 1993.
article_snippet.sent: Researchers eventually obtained permission to take a fragment of the shoulder bone in 2009 and have spent six years studying permission to take a fragment of the shoulder bone in 2009.
article_snippet.sent: in the occipital bone—there are features that distinguish this specimen from the more typical morphology of, such as the shape of the brow ridges, the relative dimension of the mastoids, and the general architecture of the cranial vault. '