At the same time as working on the prehistory of China (read the article The Chinese Cradle of Humanity), Marcel Otte, a professor of prehistory at the University of Liège, has overseen, once again for Errance publishers, the publication of a collection of texts devoted to the Aurignacians (1). After the East we thus find ourselves back in Europe, at a precise period, relatively brief and close to us in time, as it was situated between 40,000 and around 27,000 years before the present day. For those who are not familiar with these prehistoric times, let us remember that our continent, on the edges of everything, was for a long time a marginal population region. The Neanderthals who occupied it disappeared when confronted by the rise of our direct ancestors, Cro-Magnon man, who came from the Asiatic steppes. In other words, the fundamental basics of human beings’ anatomical, and thus cultural, evolution did not take place in Europe, but instead at the heart of vast continents such as Africa and Asia. ‘Aurignaceans’ is merely a generic name given following the archaeological discoveries made at the Aurignac site, in Haute-Garonne, ‘Cro-Magnon’ being moreover the site of another French archaeological site. Around 40,000 or 35,000 years before the present day, the Neanderthals found themselves in the presence of the Cro-Magnons: a cultural cataclysm which undermined them to the point of leading to their disappearance, as Marcel Otte reminds us in his introduction: ‘Humanity lives, hollows out a niche for itself and prospers through an idea. Once this is questioned a new stabilisation is called for. [...] Once the ideological cornerstone collapses, the rest rapidly follows, as far as the physical annihilation of a disorientated people.’ A lot closer to us in time, isn’t that what happened when the Spanish set foot in America?

Chapter after chapter, the book thus presents us with what we could consider as a ‘civilisation’ which progressively spread from East to West over the whole of the European continent, with the exception of the North. Here in Belgium, the Meuse valley is host to Aurignacian sites. The reader will thus discover their tools and their weapons (which for the first time were propelled, which brought to an end hand to hand combat with animals when hunting and definitively established human superiority over the animal world), their habitations (not only caves as is too often believed; there are also numerous open air settlements, as is shown by Pierre Noiret, an assistant in the ULg’s prehistory department), their beliefs, their decorative objects and, above all, their parietal art. It is to the Aurignacians that we owe the paintings in the famous Chauvet cave in France, even if this site seems to constitute a special case in the ensemble of the era’s artistic production, singular in its genius, showing all the details of graphic art before that of the Lascaux cave.

From it clearly emerges ‘a homogenous culture, united, audacious and demographically important,’ as Marcel Otte underlines. In the end, a ‘power,’ one which on reading this book we understand better why it succeeded in settling in Europe at the expense of the Neanderthals. ‘The essential particularity,’ concludes Marcel Otte, ‘was to introduce into it a world of symbols, between reality and action, as much in its weapons as in its images.’

(1) Les Aurignaciens. Edited by Marcel Otte, Paris, Editions Errance, 304 p.