The Big Game Hunters of the Vézère Valley

The Vézère valley in the Dordogne region is one of my favorite holiday destinations in France. The Vézère river, a tributary of the Dordogne river, springs on the Plateau de Millevaches in the Limousin region of Central France and flows into the Dordogne at Limeuil. Over many millennia the river cut though the highland of Cretaceous lime stones creating a deeply etched mosaic of meanders and plateaus. This mesmerising landscape, with vast karstic systems of caves and sheer lime stone cliffs, is riddled with natural cavities that have been used as shelters for hundreds of thousands of years. These prehistoric rock dwellings have provided a significant amount of archaeological relics, ranging from stone tools crafted by the most ancient of humans from the Lower Palaeolithic to exquisite cave-paintings created by first Early Modern Humans that populated the valley in a period we call the European Upper Paleolithic.

Early Modern Humans found refuge in the shelters and galleries hollowed out by the river over many millennia and it is here where they developed new, highly sophisticated and effective stone blade technologies, combined with projectile points made from new materials such as antler and bone . They also left their mark on the walls of the caves and for the first time in prehistory we find evidence of expressions of symbolic thinking in the form of cave-art and the adornments they created in stone and bone. I have visited this valley many times over the years and explored it on foot and by canoe. There is no better feeling than pitching a tent near the river and immerse yourself in the vastness of its history, going back to a very very remote period indeed.

The first evidence of early human occupation in the Vézère valley comes from La Micoque, an open-air site on the bank of the Manaurie river where it flows into the Vézère (left image). The deposits, located at the foot of a rock face, date back to the late Lower Palaeolithic, around 400,000 years ago, and cover a large part of the Middle Palaeolithic up to 130,000 years ago.

Shown on the right are several Micoqian flint tools, crafted by generations of Homo heidelbergensis, the ancestors of Neanderthals, that once lived in this rock shelter. Holding such skillfully made tools, left behind by these archaic humans hundreds of thousands of years ago is truly awe-inspiring.

The implement on the bottom left is an exhausted flint core, shown at the top of the picture is a flake and two points and on the bottom right are a large and two small scrapers. The original colour of the flint from which the tools were made was black but the physical and chemical alterations, caused by millennia of weathering, have turned them white.

The arrival of Modern Humans

The sheer cliffs surrounding the Vézère valley created an ideal micro-climate for the Neanderthals to survive the cold during the ice ages and its rock shelters provided protection against predators and bad weather conditions. The bison, horse, reindeer and mammoth roaming alluvial plains provided fresh meat, the forests produced wood and the rivers provided plenty fish and water. Camping in this valley surrounded by these towering lime stone walls still gives a very protected feeling and I can imagine that these ancient humans must have thought this was paradise. The Neanderthals occupied the Vézère valley for hundreds of thousands of years and left an abundance of remains, providing us insight into their way of life, the game they hunted and the stone tools they used. Their skeletal remains, discovered at the sites of La Ferrassie and Le Moustier, give us intimite clues of how they buried their dead.

The perfect climatic conditions and abundance of game also attracted the first modern humans to inhabit the valley, who arrived here approximately 35,000 years ago. These Cro-Magnon people, named after rock shelter Abri de Crô-Magnon in Les Eyzies de Tayac where the first specimen was discovered, arrived here from Africa, where they evolved from the African Homo heidelbergensis around 200,000 years ago (see The Stone Ages post).

The Neanderthals disappeared from the valley around the time of the arrival of the Cro-Magnon people. Why this happened is still a mystery. It is thought that the Last Glacial Maximum (Weichselien/Devensian glaciation), a period when ice sheets were at their most recent maximum extension (between 26,500 and 20,000 years ago), may have contributed to their demise. This drastic climatic freeze affected the vegetation and resulted in the disappearance of mammoths, forcing the inhabitants of the Vézère valley, and everywhere else in Europe, to adapt to new game, develop new hunting methods and design new weapons. On the other hand, Neanderthals were better adapted to a colder climate than their African cousins and should have able to survive such a cold period.

Perhaps the increasing temperature around 24,000 years ago, reaching its highest levels for 130,000 years, in combination with competition from Homo sapiens, eventually led to the disappearance of Neanderthals.

Aurignacian, Gravettian, Solutrean, Magdalenian ……

Anatomically modern humans evolved around 200,000 years ago in Africa and although they looked very different from their Neanderthal cousins, their intelectual capabilities and the tools they used weren’t very different. This all changed around 70,000 years ago when some South African hunter-gatherers developed more refined tools in the shape of thin blades struck from cores of fine grained material that often had to be sourced from a distance. In addition to the finely made stone tools, they started using bone tips as projectile points and this light-weight weaponry could be used at longer ranges compared to the heavy flake-pointed spears produced by Neanderthals. Lighter projectiles could not only be thrown at targets at a distance, they could propelled with high velocity by using a spear thrower stick, whilst the Neanderthal spears where probably only used for thrusting at close range.

Shown on the left is a Neanderthal Mousterian point (top) and the lighter projectile points made by the Cro-Magnons.

The new toolmakers that arrived in the Vézère valley would have had a decisive edge over the Neanderthals and their weaponry, especially in a transforming landscape with changing game populations during and after the last big freeze. Their unique beveled bone projectile points where first found in the foothills of the Pyrenees in a small town called Aurignac but soon the Aurignacian tools were found all over Europe and the Near East. Other typical implements from this culture are thick carinated scraper tools and large blades, often with trimmed edges that were probably used as spokeshaves for working wood or bone.

Shown on the right are a large scraper and two Aurignacian blades. The small scraper on the left is a grattoir Caminade, a typical Arignacian implement found in the Dordogne region. The carinated scraper shown below was made by removing small bladelets from the perimeter of the core.

The most important artifact in the Aurignacians tool kit was the burin (below), a simple stone chisel that enabled them turn antler and bone into razor sharp weapons and other tools such as needles to make tailored clothes to protect their tropically adapted bodies against the cold.

Over thousands of years the Upper Palaeolithic toolkit slowly evolved to even more refined stone and bone tools and hunting weapons, from the finely backed blades of the Gravettians (named after the site of La Gravette in the Dordogne) to the barbed harpoons, slender endscapers, combination tools (below) and small blades (left) of the Magdalenians (named after the La Madeleine rockshelter in the Vézère valley). Whether these different tool cultures coincide with different Cro-Magnon societies or if the change of weaponry represents adaptations to the transforming landscape or changing hunting staple, is unclear

What is clear is that during the global warming following the last ice age, from about 19,000 ya, the reindeer herds, the major staple of the Magdalenians, slowly started moving north. Some Magdalenians must have followed the reindeer, as evidenced by the discovery of their stone tool technology near the town of Sweikhuizen in the South of the Netherlands (from around 13,000 ya).

Shown here is a perçoir sur éclat (source: Don's maps), a flake piercer used to perforate hides and leather, from the rock shelter of Laugerie Basse in the Vézère valley (see a reconstruction of the rockshelter below) in comparison with its equivalent from Sweikhuizen.

Although still subject to debate, it is possible that they followed the reindeer herds as far as South-Western Britain where some late-glacial sites, such as Kent's Cavern, are also attributed to the Magdalenians.

Whilst the continuing global warming pushed the reindeers even more north and the open tundra vegetation in the alluvial plains was replaced with dense forests, the red deer became the new staple food. In this changing landscape the Magdalenian blade makers kept improving their ‘Swiss Army Knife’ blade technology further, creating even smaller and lighter microlithic projectile points and inventing new means of enhancing their range and penetrating power, such as the bow. Enter the Mesolithic period…