Prehistoric Périgord

While the Périgordian Cro-Magnon man, at 35.000 years old, may seem young compared to the Tautavel skeleton (400.000 years) and Lucy, the little 3 million year-old woman, he is nonetheless a key figure in Périgord.
The discovery of remains at Les Eyzies in the middle of the last century, and then at La Madeleine, led to a rush of archaeologists and curio-hunters, who found this to be one of the richest sites in the world.

Mention only the most famous of the two hundred sites listed (Les Eyzies, Le Moustier, La Férassie and Lascaux), and you evoke 200.000 years of history, the Palaeolithic era, a period of evolution in which man learnt to master tools, to create, to conceptualise and perform rituals. Look at the flints fashioned with ever increasing skill, the stones and sculpted rocks, the drawings and symbols covering the walls of countless caves, and above all the extraordinary animal paintings at Lascaux, whose beauty has done nothing to reveal the mystery of why they were painted. The abundance of works of art, shelters and caves to be found all along the Vézère valley, classified by UNESCO as part of the world's heritage, comes as less of a surprise given the beauty of the countryside, with its cliffs overhanging the river, the cultivated fields along its banks, and its dense, secret forests. The whole area, even the soil with its extraordinary abundance of fossils (sea urchins, shells, leaves, etc.), seems to be impregnated with the soul of humanity, with life on planet Earth.