Today, a friend sent me an article that stirred some fascinating memories. Published very recently, it described how the authors had discovered the earliest clear evidence that Neanderthals engraved designs on the walls of La Roche-Cotard, a cave that lies on the bank of the River Loire in north-west France (see CWA 121). A key point about this site is that its entrance was sealed before the first evidence for the presence in the region of anatomically modern humans. Moreover, all the stone tools found were Mousterian, and therefore made by Neanderthals. After many years of being portrayed as brutish and certainly not the sharpest of knives in the human drawer, Neanderthals have been rehabilitated. After all, we ourselves retain a modicum of their genes. We now have convincing evidence that they preyed on raptors and probably took the feathers as a form of personal decoration. They survived and even flourished as the climate cooled and continental glaciers spread across large tracts of Eurasia. Moreover, Neanderthal communities spread widely, certainly as far as the Altai Range, and coexisted with Homo sapiens for several millennia before leaving the centre stage they had occupied for so long.
So why did the discovery of a cave long concealed from human view stir those memories? I was taken back to the summer of 1956, when brother Richard and I joined a field project designed to upskill and train aspiring young archaeologists. It was at Arcy-sur-Cure, a complex of caves south-east of Paris, and it, too, was located on the bank of a river. The director, André Leroi-Gourhan, welcomed Rich and me when we arrived, dusty and tired after two long days travelling from London on our little moped bikes. We pitched our tent on the bank of the River Cure and enjoyed the first of many convivial dinners in the Trilobite Cave, a huge overhang and one of many caves that penetrated deeply into the limestone massif behind us.
The following morning, we were assigned to the Grotte de L’Hyène, the Hyaena Cave. This had a restricted entrance that led on into a cold and pitch-black chamber some 30m into the hillside. Illuminated by electric light, we began to trowel away at the deposits within, which had been laid down as floodwater swept through from the swollen river. They incorporated the occasional stone flake, some of which turned out to be complete artefacts and all of which had been made by Neanderthals. But these were not occupation deposits, so there were no exciting living floors nor the half dozen stalagmite stone circles as have been identified at Bruniquel Cave that date back about 176,000 years. It was quite a relief to get back in to the warm sunlight at lunchtime, or go for a swim at the end of the day’s digging.
