Grotte du Vallonnet
Encyclopedia
Grotte du Vallonnet is an archaeological site located near Roquebrune-Cap-Martin
, between Monaco
and Menton
, in France
, that was first discovered in 1958. Stone tools found there have been dated to between 1 and 1.05 million years, making it one of the earliest sites of human settlement known in Europe.
, at Roquebrune-Cap-Martin in the Alpes-Maritimes
Department in France. It opens onto a ravine with a small creek, the Vallonnet, which drops down to the Bay. The mountain is a massif of calcite-dolomitic rock from the Jurassic
period, covered with a pudding of stones and of hardened sand from the miocene
period. The porch of the cave is narrow and low, and opens to a corridor five metres long, which opens into a room about four metres high.
. She showed these fragments to René Pascal, an employee of the casino of Monte-Carlo and an amateur prehistorian. Marianne showed her parents, Pascal and several others to the entry of the cave. The first systematic excavations were carried out in 1962.
-Layer I was a floor of stalagmites, which could be dated between 1.4 and 1.370 million years BC. Analysis of the pollen found in the layer showed it was located in a forested landscape, where plantane trees were dominant.
-Layer II was composed of beach sand, mixed with seashells and fish bones, dated to a little over 1.05 million years. The types of fish bones found showed that at this time the cave was washed by a tropical or subtropical sea. The pollens found indicated that the landscapes were covered with pine forest, and that the climate at that time was relatively warm, with mild winters.
-Layer III was the thickest layer (1.5 metres) composed of sands mixed with stones and rocks from the pudding which hung over the cave. Mixed into this layer were numerous animal bones, either brought there by man or by predatory animals. The pollens indicated a dryer climate at that time, dominated by clusters of white oak trees.
This layer was dated by magnetostratigraphy
: the studies showed that the layer corresponded with the Jaramillo period of direct geomagnetic polarity, between the periods of inverse geomagnetic polarity of Matuyama. This allowed the archaeologists to date the layer to between 1.050 and 1 million years.
About one million years ago the entry to the cave was emptied by erosion, leaving only the sediments in the deepest part of the interior chamber. The fourth layer, A thick stalagmitic floor, formed over these sediments, and was dated by Electron paramagnetic resonance
to between 900,000 and 890,000 years. Pollens showed that the climate of this time was cooler and much wetter than the present climate.
The fifth and highest layer of sediment is composed of different sands from earlier layers of the cave, which were deposited during the successive wet periods which followed.
, the panther
, the saber-tooth tiger, and the large hyena
. These brought to the cave the carcasses of herbivores; deer
, bison
, small bovides, rhinoceros
, horses, and boars. When the predators were not in the cave, it was used by humans, who left the tools.
The bones of 25 different species of mammals were found in the cave, all characteristic of the lower Pleistocene
age. Besides those named above, bones were found of Eurasian jaguar
(Panthera gombaszoegensis), the leopard
, (Acinonyx pardinensis) the meridional elephant
(Mammuthus meridionalis), and others. Other species were found from the middle Pleistocene period, including an early species of wolf (Canis mosbachensis), an early fox
(Alopex praeglacialis), and a cave lynx
(Lynx spelaea).
), less often of sandstone, with a small number of tools made of quartz
and flint
. Percussion, or pounding, tools, were the most frequent. These included chopping tools, of poor quality. None of the tools had been reworked to improve their quality. The middle part of a femur bone of a bison was found which showed sign of being crafted into a pounding tool.
While most of the bones in the cave showed that they had been broken by the teeth of predators, a number of bones had marks that showed that they had been broken by these early tools. It appears that the early human visitors to Vallonnet cave used their stone tools to break bones and eat the marrow inside.
There were no indications of fire in the cave; fire had apparently not yet been domesticated. It appears that the people who visited the cave were not primarily hunters, but scavengers, who lived on the meat of animals killed by predators. There were also no signs that they lived in the cave.
Roquebrune-Cap-Martin
Roquebrune-Cap-Martin is a commune in the Alpes-Maritimes department in southeastern France between Monaco and Menton. The name was changed from Roquebrune to differentiate the town from Roquebrune-sur-Argens in the neighboring Var Department.-History:In pre-Roman times the area was settled by the...
, between Monaco
Monaco
Monaco , officially the Principality of Monaco , is a sovereign city state on the French Riviera. It is bordered on three sides by its neighbour, France, and its centre is about from Italy. Its area is with a population of 35,986 as of 2011 and is the most densely populated country in the...
and Menton
Menton
Menton is a commune in the Alpes-Maritimes department in the Provence-Alpes-Côte d'Azur region in southeastern France.Situated on the French Riviera, along the Franco-Italian border, it is nicknamed la perle de la France ....
, in France
France
The French Republic , The French Republic , The French Republic , (commonly known as France , is a unitary semi-presidential republic in Western Europe with several overseas territories and islands located on other continents and in the Indian, Pacific, and Atlantic oceans. Metropolitan France...
, that was first discovered in 1958. Stone tools found there have been dated to between 1 and 1.05 million years, making it one of the earliest sites of human settlement known in Europe.
Description
The cave of Vallonnet is located on the western slope of Cap Martin, about 800 metres above the Bay of MentonMenton
Menton is a commune in the Alpes-Maritimes department in the Provence-Alpes-Côte d'Azur region in southeastern France.Situated on the French Riviera, along the Franco-Italian border, it is nicknamed la perle de la France ....
, at Roquebrune-Cap-Martin in the Alpes-Maritimes
Alpes-Maritimes
Alpes-Maritimes is a department in the extreme southeast corner of France.- History : was created by Octavian as a Roman military district in 14 BC, and became a full Roman province in the middle of the 1st century with its capital first at Cemenelum and subsequently at Embrun...
Department in France. It opens onto a ravine with a small creek, the Vallonnet, which drops down to the Bay. The mountain is a massif of calcite-dolomitic rock from the Jurassic
Jurassic
The Jurassic is a geologic period and system that extends from about Mya to Mya, that is, from the end of the Triassic to the beginning of the Cretaceous. The Jurassic constitutes the middle period of the Mesozoic era, also known as the age of reptiles. The start of the period is marked by...
period, covered with a pudding of stones and of hardened sand from the miocene
Miocene
The Miocene is a geological epoch of the Neogene Period and extends from about . The Miocene was named by Sir Charles Lyell. Its name comes from the Greek words and and means "less recent" because it has 18% fewer modern sea invertebrates than the Pliocene. The Miocene follows the Oligocene...
period. The porch of the cave is narrow and low, and opens to a corridor five metres long, which opens into a room about four metres high.
Discovery
The cave was discovered by a girl of 13 years, Marianne Poire, in 1958. She regularly visited the cave and collected pieces of calciteCalcite
Calcite is a carbonate mineral and the most stable polymorph of calcium carbonate . The other polymorphs are the minerals aragonite and vaterite. Aragonite will change to calcite at 380-470°C, and vaterite is even less stable.-Properties:...
. She showed these fragments to René Pascal, an employee of the casino of Monte-Carlo and an amateur prehistorian. Marianne showed her parents, Pascal and several others to the entry of the cave. The first systematic excavations were carried out in 1962.
Layers of sediment
The excavations found five distinct layers of sediment in the cave:-Layer I was a floor of stalagmites, which could be dated between 1.4 and 1.370 million years BC. Analysis of the pollen found in the layer showed it was located in a forested landscape, where plantane trees were dominant.
-Layer II was composed of beach sand, mixed with seashells and fish bones, dated to a little over 1.05 million years. The types of fish bones found showed that at this time the cave was washed by a tropical or subtropical sea. The pollens found indicated that the landscapes were covered with pine forest, and that the climate at that time was relatively warm, with mild winters.
-Layer III was the thickest layer (1.5 metres) composed of sands mixed with stones and rocks from the pudding which hung over the cave. Mixed into this layer were numerous animal bones, either brought there by man or by predatory animals. The pollens indicated a dryer climate at that time, dominated by clusters of white oak trees.
This layer was dated by magnetostratigraphy
Magnetostratigraphy
Magnetostratigraphy is a geophysical correlation technique used to date sedimentary and volcanic sequences. The method works by collecting oriented samples at measured intervals throughout the section. The samples are analyzed to determine their characteristic remanent magnetization , that is, the...
: the studies showed that the layer corresponded with the Jaramillo period of direct geomagnetic polarity, between the periods of inverse geomagnetic polarity of Matuyama. This allowed the archaeologists to date the layer to between 1.050 and 1 million years.
About one million years ago the entry to the cave was emptied by erosion, leaving only the sediments in the deepest part of the interior chamber. The fourth layer, A thick stalagmitic floor, formed over these sediments, and was dated by Electron paramagnetic resonance
Electron paramagnetic resonance
Electron paramagnetic resonance or electron spin resonance spectroscopyis a technique for studying chemical species that have one or more unpaired electrons, such as organic and inorganic free radicals or inorganic complexes possessing a transition metal ion...
to between 900,000 and 890,000 years. Pollens showed that the climate of this time was cooler and much wetter than the present climate.
The fifth and highest layer of sediment is composed of different sands from earlier layers of the cave, which were deposited during the successive wet periods which followed.
Animal species
Layer III contained the most important findings in the cave; a collection of animal bones, and 11 simple tools used by human visitors. It appears that the cave was used as a dining room by large carnivores, notably the bearBear
Bears are mammals of the family Ursidae. Bears are classified as caniforms, or doglike carnivorans, with the pinnipeds being their closest living relatives. Although there are only eight living species of bear, they are widespread, appearing in a wide variety of habitats throughout the Northern...
, the panther
Panthera
Panthera is a genus of the family Felidae , which contains four well-known living species: the tiger, the lion, the jaguar, and the leopard. The genus comprises about half of the Pantherinae subfamily, the big cats...
, the saber-tooth tiger, and the large hyena
Hyena
Hyenas or Hyaenas are the animals of the family Hyaenidae of suborder feliforms of the Carnivora. It is the fourth smallest biological family in the Carnivora , and one of the smallest in the mammalia...
. These brought to the cave the carcasses of herbivores; deer
Deer
Deer are the ruminant mammals forming the family Cervidae. Species in the Cervidae family include white-tailed deer, elk, moose, red deer, reindeer, fallow deer, roe deer and chital. Male deer of all species and female reindeer grow and shed new antlers each year...
, bison
Bison
Members of the genus Bison are large, even-toed ungulates within the subfamily Bovinae. Two extant and four extinct species are recognized...
, small bovides, rhinoceros
Rhinoceros
Rhinoceros , also known as rhino, is a group of five extant species of odd-toed ungulates in the family Rhinocerotidae. Two of these species are native to Africa and three to southern Asia....
, horses, and boars. When the predators were not in the cave, it was used by humans, who left the tools.
The bones of 25 different species of mammals were found in the cave, all characteristic of the lower Pleistocene
Pleistocene
The Pleistocene is the epoch from 2,588,000 to 11,700 years BP that spans the world's recent period of repeated glaciations. The name pleistocene is derived from the Greek and ....
age. Besides those named above, bones were found of Eurasian jaguar
Jaguar
The jaguar is a big cat, a feline in the Panthera genus, and is the only Panthera species found in the Americas. The jaguar is the third-largest feline after the tiger and the lion, and the largest in the Western Hemisphere. The jaguar's present range extends from Southern United States and Mexico...
(Panthera gombaszoegensis), the leopard
Leopard
The leopard , Panthera pardus, is a member of the Felidae family and the smallest of the four "big cats" in the genus Panthera, the other three being the tiger, lion, and jaguar. The leopard was once distributed across eastern and southern Asia and Africa, from Siberia to South Africa, but its...
, (Acinonyx pardinensis) the meridional elephant
Elephant
Elephants are large land mammals in two extant genera of the family Elephantidae: Elephas and Loxodonta, with the third genus Mammuthus extinct...
(Mammuthus meridionalis), and others. Other species were found from the middle Pleistocene period, including an early species of wolf (Canis mosbachensis), an early fox
Fox
Fox is a common name for many species of omnivorous mammals belonging to the Canidae family. Foxes are small to medium-sized canids , characterized by possessing a long narrow snout, and a bushy tail .Members of about 37 species are referred to as foxes, of which only 12 species actually belong to...
(Alopex praeglacialis), and a cave lynx
Lynx
A lynx is any of the four Lynx genus species of medium-sized wildcats. The name "lynx" originated in Middle English via Latin from Greek word "λύγξ", derived from the Indo-European root "*leuk-", meaning "light, brightness", in reference to the luminescence of its reflective eyes...
(Lynx spelaea).
Tools
About 100 basic tools made by man were found in the cave. Most were made of calcaire (limestoneLimestone
Limestone is a sedimentary rock composed largely of the minerals calcite and aragonite, which are different crystal forms of calcium carbonate . Many limestones are composed from skeletal fragments of marine organisms such as coral or foraminifera....
), less often of sandstone, with a small number of tools made of quartz
Quartz
Quartz is the second-most-abundant mineral in the Earth's continental crust, after feldspar. It is made up of a continuous framework of SiO4 silicon–oxygen tetrahedra, with each oxygen being shared between two tetrahedra, giving an overall formula SiO2. There are many different varieties of quartz,...
and flint
Flint
Flint is a hard, sedimentary cryptocrystalline form of the mineral quartz, categorized as a variety of chert. It occurs chiefly as nodules and masses in sedimentary rocks, such as chalks and limestones. Inside the nodule, flint is usually dark grey, black, green, white, or brown in colour, and...
. Percussion, or pounding, tools, were the most frequent. These included chopping tools, of poor quality. None of the tools had been reworked to improve their quality. The middle part of a femur bone of a bison was found which showed sign of being crafted into a pounding tool.
While most of the bones in the cave showed that they had been broken by the teeth of predators, a number of bones had marks that showed that they had been broken by these early tools. It appears that the early human visitors to Vallonnet cave used their stone tools to break bones and eat the marrow inside.
There were no indications of fire in the cave; fire had apparently not yet been domesticated. It appears that the people who visited the cave were not primarily hunters, but scavengers, who lived on the meat of animals killed by predators. There were also no signs that they lived in the cave.
Comparison with other archaeological sites
- Gona, Afar, EthiopiaEthiopiaEthiopia , officially known as the Federal Democratic Republic of Ethiopia, is a country located in the Horn of Africa. It is the second-most populous nation in Africa, with over 82 million inhabitants, and the tenth-largest by area, occupying 1,100,000 km2...
. Oldest known man-made stone tools, 2.55 million years BC. - DmanisiDmanisiDmanisi is a townlet and archaeological site in Kvemo Kartli region of Georgia approximately 93 km southwest of the nation’s capital Tbilisi in the river valley of Mashavera.- History :...
, GeorgiaGeorgia (country)Georgia is a sovereign state in the Caucasus region of Eurasia. Located at the crossroads of Western Asia and Eastern Europe, it is bounded to the west by the Black Sea, to the north by Russia, to the southwest by Turkey, to the south by Armenia, and to the southeast by Azerbaijan. The capital of...
. Remains of Homo georgicusHomo georgicusHomo georgicus is a species of Homo that was suggested in 2002 to describe fossil skulls and jaws found in Dmanisi, Georgia in 1999 and 2001, which seem intermediate between Homo habilis and H. erectus. A partial skeleton was discovered in 2001. The fossils are about 1.8 million years old...
, oldest fossils of man in Europe, 1.8 million years BC. - Basin of Gaudix-Baza, Barranco Leon, Fuenta Nueva Three, Sima del Elefante, AtapuercaAtapuercaThe Atapuerca Mountains is an ancient karstic region of Spain, in the province of Burgos and near Atapuerca and Ibeas de Juarros. It contains several caves, where fossils and stone tools of the earliest known Hominins in West Europe have been found. The earliest hominids may have dated to 1.2...
, Spain. 1.1 million–1.2 million years BC.
- Grotte du Vallonnet. 1 million–1.05 million years BC.
- Gran Dolina, Atapuerca, Spain. 780,000 years BC.
- Terra AmataTerra AmataTerra Amata is an archeological site in open air located on the slopes of Mount Boron in Nice, at a level 26 meters above the current sea level of the Mediterranean. It was discovered and excavated in 1966 by Henry de Lumley...
, Nice, France. 480,000 BC. - Lascaux Caves, Dordogne, France. 17,300 BC.