The Cradle and the Cave

To people in the nearby Riviera town of Roquebrune-Cap-Martin, the cavern is known as Le Trou du Tachou (the Badger's Hole). Hidden away on a Mediterranean hillside covered with olive trees and scrub oak, it was discovered in 1962 by a little girl looking for shiny stones for her collection. What subsequent explorers of the 16-ft. by 16-ft. grotto have found promises to be a great deal more significant: the habitat of the earliest known manlike creatures ever to dwell in Europe.

Until recently the Continent's most ancient inhabited site was thought to be Czechoslovakia's Stranska Skala Grotto, where archaeologists have found tools that are some 700,000 years old. Now Prehistorian Henry de Lumley is convinced that manlike creatures lived and worked in the Riviera cave at least 1 million years ago.

Glacial Age. De Lumley, a Marseille University professor, who with his archaeologist wife Marie-Antoinette has been excavating the grotto for a dozen years, bases his estimate on paleomagnetic dating of the clay in which traces of ancient man were found. During a period of warmer temperatures some 1 1/2 million years ago, De Lumley believes, the waters of the Mediterranean rose and waves battered the hillside, enlarging the limestone grotto, and leaving the various fossilized fish, mollusks and tiny marine organisms that have been found in the cave. About 1 million years ago, the sea retreated and a new glacial age swept over Europe. It was at this point that the first manlike creatures apparently took refuge in the cavern, which had escaped the encroaching ice.

Although the De Lumleys found no bones of those early cave dwellers, they did uncover indisputable signs of their presence: choppers made from pebbles, sharpened flints and bones, and even antlers that had been fashioned into tools. Says De Lumley: "The discovery of such pebble tools--man's oldest, most primitive tools--establishes for the first time the existence of a 'pebble culture' in Europe." He and his wife also discovered the teeth and bones of elephants, lions, panthers, bears, cheetahs, hyenas, wolves, porcupines, deer and antelope, rhinos, hippos, even seals and whales, and those animals had obviously been brought to the cave by its manlike inhabitants. De Lumley doubts that the cave dwellers were good hunters or fishermen; the condition of the animals' teeth and jaws indicates that they were very old. Says the paleontologist: "The cavemen either killed them when they were pretty decrepit or perhaps found them already dead." The whales and seals could well have been washed onto the beach, where the cavemen then hacked them to pieces. In fact, says De Lumley, "one may legitimately ask whether they hunted at all."

However they obtained their food, the Riviera cavemen could barely be called human; they lived "like animals in a lair." There were perhaps no more than five or six of them in the cave at any one time, and apparently none were good housekeepers. "They shoved the bones of animals they had eaten toward the walls," says De Lumley, "and the tools they used toward the middle of the grotto. The place must surely have smelled horrible." There is no evidence that they cooked their food; the De Lumleys failed to find a trace of a hearth or fire. That raises an important question in De Lumley's mind: "Was man a carrion eater before he became a hunter?"

The Badger's Hole has not yet yielded an answer. On the contrary, the cave may complicate the story of man's evolution. One view is that the cradle of the human race is to be found in the savannas of eastern or southern Africa, where the first true hominids or manlike creatures, called australopithecines ("apes of the south"), appeared some 5 million years ago. If so, how and when did the australopiths-or their descendants-leave Africa and make new homes in Europe or Asia? Neither De Lumley nor anyone else yet knows, but he thinks that the Badger's Hole invites some exciting speculation: "Perhaps man had several different cradles, one of them in Europe?"

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