French dig up Neanderthal 'butcher's shop'

CAOURS, Somme - French and Belgian archaeologists have found conclusive proof that Neanderthals - mankind's closest relatives - were living in near tropical conditions, hunting rhinoceros and elephant, close to what is now the French Channel coast 125,000 years ago.

No traces of Neanderthal activity have been found before in northwest Europe during this period - a 15,000 year gap between two ice ages.

Historians thought that Neanderthals, who thrived in cold conditions, had failed to adapt to the warmer weather and had retreated to the east or to the north. The new site at Caours, near Abbeville, close to the mouth of the river Somme, proves that this was not so.

A two-year dig by two French Government research bodies has uncovered evidence of a Neanderthal "butcher's shop" on an ancient river-bank - a site where family or tribal groups worked for a period of a few decades or maybe centuries.

To this place, now a maize field, beside an open barn and a group of bungalows, they dragged animals as large as rhinoceros, elephant and aurochs, the forerunner of the cow. The Neanderthals - known to be squat, powerful people, who had language and fire and buried their dead - sliced up the animals with flint tools for their meat and pounded their bones for their marrow.

This is the second announcement of an important Neanderthal discovery in two weeks. This month, British archaeologists reported that they had found evidence that a few members of the species (Homo neanderthalis) may have survived in caves in Gibraltar much later than was previously thought - until about 28,000 years ago, or maybe even 24,000 years ago. It was thought that they vanished about 30,000 years ago.

Both finds are potentially vital new pieces in the incomplete jig-saw of modern understanding of our near-human, European predecessors. The problem is that the two discoveries seem to be part of different puzzles.

Jean-Luc Locht, a Belgian expert in pre-history at the French Government's archaeological service Inrap, was one of the three principal researchers at Caours in the Somme.

He said: "This is a very important site, a unique site. It proves that Neanderthals thrived in a warm northwest Europe and hunted animals like the rhinoceros and the aurochs, just as they previously, and later, hunted ice-age species like the mammoth and the reindeer." No Neanderthal remains have been found so far on the new site on the Somme or among the new finds in Gibraltar. In both cases, their presence has been revealed by other discoveries: flint tools in Gibraltar; a trove of flint tools and fossilised animal bones in the Somme.

The bones, found in a geological layer laid down about 125,000 years ago, show signs of having been sawn through, crushed or stripped of meat by flint tools. The animal species identified include a small fragment of elephant bone, several rhinoceros teeth, and many remnants of aurochs, wild boar and several kinds of deer.

The dig - which will continue next summer - has also unearthed flint scraping or cutting tools and a flint pounding implement, used for crushing bones or splitting other pieces of flint.

The back-to-back French and British announcements create a pre-historical conundrum.

The Gibraltar discovery suggests that Neanderthals survived for as much as 8000 years after a two-legged rival first appeared in Europe out of Africa - Homo sapiens sapiens or mankind. An 8000-year period of Neanderthal/ sapiens co-habitation suggests that mankind was not responsible for wiping out the Neanderthals.

The find in the Somme suggests that if Neanderthals were able to survive the ending of an earlier ice age, they were presumably capable of surviving the fluctuations in climate long before the ice sheet finally withdrew from Europe about 15,000 years ago.

In which case, the finger of "blame" for their demise after thriving in Europe for 270,000 years points, once again, at Homo sapiens.

- INDEPENDENT