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Crag martins getting ready to go, Les Eyzies

Crag martins getting ready to go, Les Eyzies

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.