French Prehistory

French Prehistory

French Prehistory

There has never been a French race. The area that makes up France today is the place where the invasions stopped and where the invaders settled down. Ligurians inhabited the Alps and Iberians took the Pyrenees.Phoenician sailors traversed the Mediterranean Sea and named one of their stopping places Monaco, which in their language meant "to rest".

Semitic traders exchanged pearls, pottery and colored fabrics for slaves.

Greek navigators created settlements along the coast and brought with them their philosophy, religion, olive trees and money.

They developed the cities of Massila, Nicea, Antipolis, which we know as Marseilles, Nice and Antibes. But in the long history of this land they were the new-comers.

Tens of thousands of years before them, human beings had lived and hunted and traded. Their story lies deep in the mists of French prehistory and little is left that speaks of their even having been here; little, that is, of what we can see from above ground.

In the Valley of Vezere, in the province of Perigord, the river flows between two walls of stone. Its high banks are pierced by the openings of caves and shelters, dozens of them. In ages long past, these caverns formed a kind of French prehistoric city.

These caves have yielded stone tools and weapons, animal bones and human skulls. Some 30,000 years ago humans lived here, protected by the inaccessibility of their dens and by the fire that they wielded.

We cannot truly say that these peoples belong to the "History of France", but, like all civilizations, French history lies on mysterious and deep foundations and shares cultural aspects that are the common heritage of humans.

The stories of these people long forgotten had only come to light in the 20th century.

In 1940, four young teenagers hiking in the hills found an opening in the rocks behind some bushes where a large pine tree had fallen the winter before. Upon entering they found scores of paintings of animals long gone from this region: the rhinoceros, the tiger and the mammoth.

The Cave of Lascaux has shed much light on French Prehistory and has given us more than a glimpse into the lives and minds of these peoples.

In 1994, a group of avid spelunkers found in a cave scores of paintings and sketches of animals. These paintings predated those of Lascaux by more than 12,000 years.

Known as Chauvet the findings there have filled in quite a bit of missing history.

Before the Celts, before the Romans, before Kings and Cardinals, Generals and Emperors, these people lived and moved in what is now France.

We leave French Prehistory now and move on to what can truly be called the Beginnings of French History, to the Renaissance.

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