Wolves Wild

Butterflies in les Eyzies. Only the small white was taken during our recent visit: the others date from an earlier visit, exactly twelve years earlier.

A large assortment of flowers which drew my attention enough for me to picture them during our recent visit to France. Most were by roadsides in les Eyzies, either growing wild, planted by the authorities or in gardens. A few in a riverside park in Bordeaux, and one features a flower bed in the Luxemburg Gardens, Paris.

This striped shield bug doesn’t exactly have camouflage which lets it blend in with whatever plants it lands on. There have been a smattering of records of them in England, the furthest north in Solihull.

Incising and sculptures representing women and fertility. The so-called Venus of Laussel (otherwise known as the Venus with the horn) and some of the other larger pieces are in the Museum of the Aquitaine in Bordeaux, the others in the museum at les Eyzies.

A bison, engraved on a piece of reindeer horn, licking its back, perhaps trying to soothe a sore spot where an insect has bitten it. Two other bisons, also on reindeer horn. These were all incorporated into spear-throwers.

Larger carvings, extracted from the walls of local caves, portray a group of horses and a pair of aurochs in low relief.

On the walls and ceilings of some of the caves and rock shelters in the neighbourhood, many, many portrayals of ice animals are still in situ. A herd of horses, in low reliefs getting on for the size of Shetland ponies; a life-sized relief of a salmon, so detailed that it’s possible to tell its sex and the time of year. One cave has hundreds of small incised drawings, which can only be reached by a long trek through narrow passages to deep underground. Another has the only polychrome paintings of ice-age mammals, the originals of which can still be visited.

I don’t remember ever having seen a crazy golf course outside an English seaside town before. Behind a bar in a small village in the middle of France, there was the full set of eighteen holes. The course wasn’t in use, though the equipment didn’t seem to me to be particularly old.

The area was in use: as a chicken run. Several happy-looking hens were wandering round, looking for things to eat. Other houses in the village also had hens wandering round at loose in their gardens.

Strutting round most proudly was this fine feathered fellow, coming right up to the wall directly below where I was leaning out of the bar’s terrace.

A minor road by the river in les Eyzies. A common wall lizard was basking in the sun on the wall, as they do. It saw me, but didn’t immediately shoot off to hide in a crack in the wall. It did start to move, but leisurely. Perhaps it realised I wasn’t much of a threat standing still some distance away, but it was getting in position to sprint off if I came closer.

A marbled shield bug poses by walking slowly over the marbled table top on the balcony of the hotel we were staying in at les Eyzies. There were lots of these insects on plants in the area immediately around the village.

These distinctive shield bugs are indigenous to the far east of Asia, but are now well established in western Europe. They have been recorded in Britain, but, as yet, not quite as often. They have also reached the United States, where they are spreading from the east coast.

The table top is marked by what I’m almost certain are fossils. If so, it is not a true marble. Possibly it’s a polished limestone, and just perhaps from a local rock.

ADDED: it seems that while we were away, there have been press reports that this species is poised to invade Britain. From what we noticed of their propensity for fast breeding during a few days of fairly casual observation in rural France, I’m not surprised.

Autumn is the peak time of year for fungi. The hills of the Périgord are well wooded: even the cliffs where they are not too steep. Dense mixed woodland on a limestone soil probably means a rich mix of interesting fungi, including the black truffles which are prized by gourmets. Even in and immediately around the town there were a surprising variety of species.

The most striking, to me, were these dyeballs. From the name, they were a source of some kind of pigment. There are records of them in Britain, but much more common on the continental mainland. These were growing at the foot of the cliff by the railway station road, and a stone’s throw away from the Cro-magnon shelter.

The most famous prehistoric site in the region is probably the Lascaux cave. It’s in the same river valley as les Eyzies, but almost twenty miles further upstream. It’s also been much degraded by what has come to be called overtourism. Large numbers of visitors have severely damaged the paintings on the walls and roof. Tourists now see a modern copy of the cave. Indeed, overtourism has degraded two copies already, so the current attraction is Lascaux IV.

What makes les Eyzies stand out is the shear number of (mostly smaller scale) sites where evidence was found of ice age occupation: hundreds of caves and rock shelters. Many don’t look particularly spectacular. The Cro-Magnon rock shelter looks more fitting as a place to take cover from a sudden downpour than as accommodation, however temporary. But others contain some of the most spectacular examples of prehistoric art which is still visible in its original location. Visitor numbers are strictly limited, some sites are up a long steep path half way up a cliff face leading to caves where the passages are sometimes low, narrow and twisty.

Some sites also have small museums with some of the artefacts they had produced. In the centre of the village (population 809 in 2019 according to Wikipedia) is the French National Museum of Prehistory. A museum of its standard would almost certainly be located in the capital city of any other western European or north American country.

Some of the martins having a final feed before getting ready for the long flight south. They dropped from the cliff face, heading wherever the insects where: over the rooftops, round the jib of a tall crane, or swooping over the river. We arrived in the area on a sunny day in mid-September, when it seemed that most or all of the martins were still there. The next day, the weather started to go downhill at the start of the bout of autumn storms which affected a swathe of western Europe. Now only a few martins were around. I thought they might be ones which had started their journey further north, and had taken the chance of a break and a last good meal.

Les Eyzies bills itself, with some hyperbole, as the “World Capital of Prehistory”. The area is rich in wildlife now, but was far more so during the Ice Ages. As the glaciers advanced and retreated during the cold spells and the warm ones, the local climate alternated between tundra and temperate. As these phases gave way to one another, the area supported herds of many kinds of large mammals, mostly of species now extinct. There were mammoths, bison, reindeer and other deer, goats and horses. In the rivers, there were salmon coming upstream to spawn.

All of these herds survived by making annual migrations in search of the right feeding grounds for each season.  The broad river valleys, and especially that of the Vézère and its side streams with their high cliffs to the left and right, funnelled these migrations into narrow channels. The topography was almost as if designed for yet another largish mammal to set traps to hunt for big game.

The first evidence that anatomically modern humans had been alive at the same time as the extinct mammals of the ice age came from les Eyzies. In the 1850s the area got a railway station. Workers building the access road to the station dug up three skeletons in a small overhang in the cliff face. When these were investigated further, they were found to be in the same layers as the bones of ice age creatures. The overhang was called the Abri [shelter in the local dialect] Cro-Magnon. The human skeletons were dubbed Cro-Magnons, the (then earliest known Homo sapiens in western Europe.

Investigations much nearer our own time has shown that there had been Homo sapiens in Africa for many thousands of years prior to the Cro-Magnons. But in the middle nineteenth century palaeontology research  was pretty much limited to investigations by western European leisured amateurs in western Europe, with interpretations heavily distorted by the racism of the time. Quite a lot of the effort looks with hindsight like a competition between British and French enthusiasts, each trying to show that their own country had the best survivals of the earliest humans. When the competition had these limited rules, the French won hands down.

Since the uncovering of those skeletons, there have been extensive investigations in the area, which has proved to be incredibly rich in remains from this part of the past. The slew of sites showing human occupation are a record of the presence of what were most likely also migrant bands, not only of Cro-Magnons but also, during the same long ages, of Neandertals.