A space of expression, or ritual, or both. What Bruno Kowalczewski had discovered in this chamber-gallery under the hill was an early masterpiece by a Neanderthal Richard Serra, or Robert Smithson. This meant that the rings couldn’t have been made by us, Homo sapiens, as we only arrived in Europe around 50,000 years ago and that when we did finally make it there, we may have found its hidden places and shelters filled with aura by artworks already tens of thousands of years old. It’s kind of magical, even without the structures.” Verheyden and colleagues used uranium-series dating to more definitively place the rings at around 176,500 years old - around 130,000 years older than any cave painting yet discovered. “I’m not very big,” she recalled, “and I had to put one arm before me and one behind to get through. Verheyden wondered: why hadn’t anyone dated the broken stalagmites? She obtained permission to do so, and in 2013, found herself edging sideways through Bruno Kowalczewski’s tunnel. It wasn’t until recently - when Sophie Verheyden, an employee of the Royal Belgian Institute of Natural Sciences and a lifelong spelunker, happened to learn of the cave from an exhibition display at a nearby castle - that anyone explored the cave’s mysteries further. And with that, inquiry into the Bruniquel Cave came to an abrupt halt. But this age of revelations ended quickly, for in April 1999, while guiding colleagues through a nearby karstic network, Rouzaud had a heart attack and died. The rings they had discovered, one writer suggested, may have served as a map to the stars. The Kowalczewskis knew they’d found something extraordinary, and contacted archaeologist Francois Rouzaud, who, by carbon dating a burnt bear bone, suggested that the site was around 47,600 years old - so old that it was pushing the limits of carbon dating, which is only accurate up to 50,000 years. They’d been broken up deliberately, sometimes glazed in small fires, and arranged like the sign for infinity: ∞ ![]() And then, 1,102 feet inside the hill, they reached a place nobody like them had ever seen before the passage opened into a chamber, and at its center there were two huge rings made up of hundreds of stalagmites. They crept in, finding old animal bones, traces of bear activity, some pools of still water. After three years of digging, in February 1990, the Kowalczewskis and members of the local caving club broke through into a deep passageway that hadn’t been visited for a very long time. In the late Eighties, twelve-year-old Bruno Kowalczewski was out hiking with his dad in Aveyron Valley, a forested region of steep gorges and rocky cliffs in southern France, when they were surprised to feel a faint breeze blowing out of the hillside from under ancient scree.īruno started clearing away the rocks to find out what was on the other side. Kindred: Neanderthal Life, Love, Death and Art
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