The appearance of man in Piedmont dates back to the Lower Palaeolithic, around 200,000 years ago, at a time when his ancestors pushed their way to the foothills of the Alps.
The places where traces have been found (stones chipped by human hands to make weapons or tools) are the plains near the Po, the Montarolo ridge near Trino Vercellese. Here, over tens of thousands of years, groups of nomadic hunters stopped several times to bivouac in search of new prey to feed themselves: elephants, mammoths, rhinoceroses, marmots (which at that time also lived on the plains, given the harsh climate, unlike today).
100,000 years later, during the last glacial period, the first traces of Homo sapiens appeared, moving from Trino towards Val Sesia. It was here that the skull of a Neanderthal man was found, probably buried there by his companions: one of the few finds in the whole of northern Italy.
