Fontainebleau (France) (AFP)

With its 2,000 rock shelters housing thousands of prehistoric engravings, the forest of Fontainebleau is not only a popular hiking area for Ile-de-France residents but an archaeological site that is still very little known.

The rocks with unusual shapes which mark out the immense forest and are the delight of climbing enthusiasts conceal their secrets, already attracting niche tourism less than a hundred kilometers from Paris.

In a large area between Nemours and Rambouillet, thousands of engravings from -8,000 BC have been left by the last hunter-gatherers. And the Cro-Magnon man also left some traces, rare but remarkable, 20,000 years ago.

- "Little equivalent density" -

"Fontainebleau is one of the concentrations of rock art in Europe. For the time of the last hunter-gatherers of prehistoric times, we probably have a kind of small symbolic territory preserved. We have very little equivalent density in rock art, elsewhere in Europe for this period ", underlines to AFP Boris Valentin, professor of prehistoric archeology in Paris 1 Panthéon Sorbonne.

The rock engravings of Fontainebleau have been known since 1860, but research has accelerated since 1975 thanks to an association of volunteers, GERSAR.

He slipped into a narrow slit between two rocks and points to the engravings that adorn a rock: "It is a totally mysterious and inexplicable site". We are faced with "a religious art, a little original", he comments fascinated.

- "Petit Lascaux d'Ile-de-France" -

Boris Valentin admires 6 parallel furrows on a rock, which date back to around 20,000 BC. "Here we have a little Lascaux from Ile-de-France ... very small but nevertheless remarkable".

"It looks like one of the little horses of the Axial Diverticulum of Lascaux (one of the major parts of the famous cave, Editor's note). There are very few such ancient works in the Fontainebleau massif", he underlines.

The shape of other features carved into the rock "resembles a female pubic triangle," notes the researcher.

"I like to say that it is about the Origin of the World in reference to Courbet's painting, it is so amazing this feminine presence! A large number of mythologies evoke the emergence of living beings, animals in particular from the underworld and the underworld which is considered feminine, ”he explains.

Professor Valentin wonders about two types of art in these two eras. In the engravings of -8,000, "the symbolic universe is purely abstract, purely geometric with essentially grid lines. This passage from animal art to abstract art refers to very different thought systems".

This questions him because the lifestyles of these nomadic hunter-gatherers must have been quite similar in the two periods. Why then, he remarks, this "shift in the systems of thoughts, probably in the religions".

Here and there, hikers have immortalized their passage by inscribing their initials on the rock inscriptions, which "hurts the heart", confides Sophie David, "Exceptional Forest / Archaeologist" project manager at the National Forestry Office (ONF).

"These engravings are in danger", she warns: "People have had fun carving initials, unfortunately they engraved them on engravings which are more than 10,000 years old".

"Hence the importance of explaining: + wait, it is an exceptional heritage, very fragile. If we do not preserve it, tomorrow it will no longer be there. And if we see engravings like that, we can observe but we do not touch them and we do not regrave over them! "

A pedagogy all the more necessary as the forest of Fontainebleau has seen its attendance jump since the lifting of confinement.

© 2020 AFP