My trip back to England through France

My little friend by the Dordogne on my way through France.

          My next stopover was in the Perigord where Jean Auel had based some of her Children of the Earth books.  The culture of early Cro-Magnons is very interesting to me. This is where art began. These caves show the development of painting, where people had time on their hands to paint with ochre or charcoal mixed with animal fat. They painted everyday things that they saw. The amazing thing is that no other creature in Earth's history had ever done this before. The Neanderthals shared the same lands as the Cro-Magnons at this time, but the Neanderthals were eclipsed by the new breed of humans. They never learned to paint...They never learned to fish.....They never learned to socialize. More recent finds have indicated that right a the end the had learned to copy some of the later humans.      The photo is of a tribute statue to early man.

 A tragedy at the dawn of time eliminated a different branch of humanity whose culture could have enriched ours. The first of Jean Auel's books was the Clan of the Cave Bear. It was based on a genuine find of Neanderthal skeletons buried with the body of a cave bear. Jean wove this into her first story. The true events in modern day are just as interesting as her story.

The man who lived in this house beside the big hole in the ground found out that an archaeology team had discovered this burial place in the caves beneath his land. The entrance to the cave system was on somebody else’s land. Having seen the number of people who had come and paid to see the Lascaux cave paintings, he decided to make a new entrance to the cave system, but on his land. He began digging in secret. Within a few months his excavations collapsed the cave system and buried a valuable archaeological site under tons of rubble. The archaeologists petitioned the government to stop people capitalizing on their finds until they gave permission.






This guy was undeterred by the ban and promptly opened a centre on his land with live cave bears as the main attraction. It is still there today. Here is a photo of one of the cave bears. It was sleeping in it’s den, but the wife of the owner promptly prodded it with a big stick from the other side of it’s massive cage door so that I could take a photo.

   I also vistied the reconstructed Lascaux 2 with all the wonderful paintings replicated.
In all I spent three days in these valleys sightseeing before driving north to Calais and the ferry.