- LES EYZIES, Dordogne -- The
bison turning its head to lick its flank, carved with extraordinary precision
from a reindeer antler, might have been made yesterday. Even the animal's
tongue, a couple of millimetres long, is visible.
-
- The mint-fresh small carving, among the most celebrated
and startlingly beautiful examples of palaeolithic art, was made 12,000
years ago. Since its discovery in the Dordogne, in south-west France, it
has rarely been seen in public. It went on permanent, public display this
month for the first time.
-
- The bison se lÈchant is among 18,000 objects -
many never shown before - in France's Museum of Pre-history, which opened
this month in Les Eyzies-de-Tayac, in the Dordogne. The museum, 20 years
in the planning, arguing and making, is a triumph. It is attracting more
visitors than can be comfortably handled in the village which calls itself,
with some justification, the "capital of pre-history".
-
- In Les Eyzies, the Frenchman Edouard Lartet and the Englishman
Henry Christy made the discoveries from 1863 that proved beyond doubt the
existence of distant ancestors of humanity, from many centuries before
the earliest Biblical times.
-
- In 1868, near the Les Eyzies railway station, human remains
were found in a cave called Cro-Magnon ("the cave of M. Magnon"),
which gave its name to the earliest known period of Homo sapiens' residence
in Europe. The last traces of the "Neanderthal" cousins of humanity,
interbred with or wiped out by Homo sapiens 30,000 years ago, were also
found near here. Just down the road are the famous Lascaux cave paintings,
an 80m-long, four-sided frieze, densely packed with animal images; they
were found in 1940. A couple of kilometres away is the Madeleine site,
where the carved bison was; it lends its name to the "Magdelanian"
period 18,000 years ago which produced an explosion of primitive (and not
so primitive) art.
-
- The "licking bison" has spent most of the past
century locked away, appearing only for occasional exhibitions. The pre-history
museum at Les Eyzies has made a policy decision to show original artefacts,
rather than copies, wherever possible.
-
- The bison, and a similarly delicate carving of a hyena
from the same site, have been painstakingly restored and reluctantly given
up by the Saint-German museum to return to their original home. The MusÈe
National de Pre-histoire replaces a small, cluttered museum, in a ruined
ch,teau clinging to the cliff-sides at Les Eyzies in 1913. The museum,
designed by the Italian-born French architect, Jean-Pierre Buffi, is glued
to the cliffs in which Magdelanian Man lived.
-
- Or not quite glued. The building, made from large blocks
of local sandstone and vaguely resembling an Aztec temple, has one side
with large, picture windows a couple of feet from the cliff. Light reflects
eerily, and beautifully, from the cliff-side, giving visitors the impression,
as they climb the floors, that they are ascending the strata of pre-human
and early human history.
-
- The museum sketches the human story from the earliest
times in Africa 3,500,000 years ago but concentrates on the relatively
"recent" history of the people who crowded into the PÈrigord
region of France from 20,000 years ago.
-
- The museum has three startlingly life-like "recreations"
of our ancestors, a Kenyan hominid boy from 1,800,000 years ago, a Neanderthal
father and son and a Cro-Magnon hunter. All have been created from actual
skeletons, using the techniques used by police scientists to try to identify
more recent human remains. The Neanderthal father and son look disturbingly
modern; so does the Cro-Magnon hunter, with his fetching animal-skin trousers
(copied from cave paintings).
-
- Another exhibit cuts through the millennia to remind
visitors that our distant ancestors shared many of the emotions and customs
we assume to be "modern". The burial chamber of a three-year-old
girl was found to include hundreds of seashell buttons, displayed here
in gleaming rows. The buttons once covered the garment in which she was
buried: proving the child was either from a high, social caste or much
loved, and probably both.
-
- Why should the Dordogne be so richly endowed with pre-historical
sites? Was this area colonised especially heavily by early man or have
the remains survived better here than elsewhere? It is a little of both,
Alain Turq, the deputy curator of the museum says. "There was abundant
water here, abundant flint for tools, abundant game. When the ice ages
made the areas further north inhospitable, including northern France, Germany
and Britain, it appears that animals migrated here and the early men, of
course, followed the animals." The Dordogne is still being colonised,
by Britons fleeing inhospitable weather.
-
- M. Turq says the museum is a research tool for the expert,
and a public voyage of discovery through time. One 13-year-old French boy
called David wrote in the visitors' book: "My history teacher told
us you can't go back in time. You have proved you can." Ý ©
2004 Independent Digital (UK) Ltd http://news.independent.co.uk/europe/story.jsp?story=546468
|