The prehistoric lake that was born in Antella (300 thousand years ago)

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If in the Pleistocene Epoch of the Quaternary Era, we looked out from the spur of Montisoni or, even higher, from Montemasso, instead of a plain populated with roads, houses and farmland, we would have seen an immense lake with no end.

When the Pliocene sea of Tuscany began to move away from the Apennines (4 to 5 million years ago) there was a ground lift with the emergence of mountains that created some lake basins including one known geologically as the Villafranchian lake Florence-Prato-Pistoia which stretched over 40 kilometers, with a depth variation from 50 to 200 meters.

Even in the fourteenth century, Giovanni Villani – in his Cronica – had hypothesized the existence of this great prehistoric lake and even Leonardo da Vinci – in a page of the Codex Atlanticus – had admirably understood that a vast reservoir had to have existed in ancient times.

The lake began right in Antella. Even today, on the hill known as La Tomba – a few hundred meters from the parish church – mixed with sandy clay, emerges a great mass of “stony sediments, notched and sharpened” by millennial rolling in water. The banks of the lake were covered by lush forest where prehistoric animals grazed peacefully like mammoth-elephants, deer and rhinos, while hippos and whales lived in the water.

 

Many of us remember seeing in the attic of the Montemasso oratory the famous whale bone that probably was a jawbone of a huge whale which lived in this lake. Around five hundred thousand years ago, due to erosion of the Gonfolina rock, the waters lowered down towards the sea, the lake disappeared and a great marshy expanse remained from Florence to Pistoia. Instead, the waters of Antella open a gap between the hill of Belmonte and Poggio a Grilli and subsided completely into the Ema basin, leaving the small valley with a dense and valuable humus.

Man never saw the prehistoric lake that appeared in our territory about three hundred thousand years ago, in the Paleolithic Age. Throughout the area ​​Villanovan artefacts have been found followed by, in more numerous numbers, Etruscan artefacts. Even the Romans took advantage of the fertility of this land, settling down with farms and rustic villas of which there are archaeological remains.

 

 

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