Paris (AFP)
A prehistoric site from the Middle Paleolithic, filled with tools carved using technology typical of Neanderthals, has been unearthed near the banks of the Seine in Clichy-la-Garenne in the Paris region, the Institute announced on Thursday. National Preventive Archaeological Research (Inrap).
This is the first Neanderthal site discovered on the outskirts of Paris since excavations in the 19th century revealed, in the large quarries of Clichy-Levallois, the existence of this stone-cutting technique, known as the "Levallois method".
The new group dates back to the Middle Paleolithic, a prehistoric period between -350,000 years and -45,000 years before our era.
It was then located along the river, whose banks have shifted slightly since.
While excavating the oldest levels, archaeologists have found elements of a fauna associated with sharp shards of cut flint.
Placed flat, "as if they had not moved since," told AFP Sophie Clément, scientific manager of the site.
These sharp shards are typical of the "Levallois method", an elaborate debitage technique, which consisted in pre-determining the stone shards that the craftsman-tailor would take out of the raw material.
A method "emblematic of the Middle Paleolithic, associated with Neanderthals", specifies the archaeologist, specialist in lithic technology.
Was the site a fabrication shop?
"It would be something more instantaneous: the men would have probably stopped at this spot and cut stones for an immediate need - for example to consume the fauna found nearby," she suggests.
"They mastered the technology so well that they could afford to cut a few pieces and leave, leaving their tools on site ... they were not in a logic of + profitability + that we find more at Sapiens", advance the archaeologist.
The first observations of this technique, in the 19th century, were also surprising because "we were still at the beginnings of prehistoric times, with a biblical chronology, and some still had a very savage vision of man + before the flood +", says she.
The archaeologists had discovered the first site on the occasion of the development of Haussmannian Paris, between 1860 and 1870. A nod to history, it is also in a context of redevelopment of Greater Paris that these new "tools Levallois "were found.
"The circle is complete", welcomes the prehistorian.
The icing on the cake, his team found, in higher layers, a fragment of mammoth tusk, unfortunately very damaged.
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