A Neanderthal in Paris

During a trip to Paris, briefly mentioned in my post prompted by the Levallois termination of Metro Line 3, as Jan and I were riding around the city in the relatively cheesy luxury of a City Sightseeing bus (having not actually ever done this before in the dozen or so times we have been in the city), I spotted Neanderthals.

Okay, not real actual Neanderthals, or Homo Sapiens dressed up as Neanderthals, or waxwork Neanderthals, nor  a metaphorical group of Neanderthals in the modern parlance of someone behaving thuggishly (an irritating journalistic tic), nor am I referring to the Yellow Vest protesters we spotted gathering on the Champs Elysees, who were at that time gazing in the window of an expensive jewellery shop for some reason as riot police descended sirens blazing.

No, what I spotted was the silhouette of Neanderthals carrying jagged streaks of spears spread across a poster with a psychedelic background at the Trocadero.

Having realised that we were in Paris at the same time as Neandertal L’Expo at Musee D’Homme, and that the exhibition was about to end (or become extinct) a week or so later on 7th January 2019, we vowed to return the following day.

And so we returned, on the second last day of 2018, via the Metro although I was unable to travel to the Trocadero using the olive-coloured Levalloisian line.

The exhibition was re-reassuringly inexpensive, only adding a couple of euros to the entrance price of the Musee D’Homme, although we did have to navigate a security guard with a gun to enter.

The exhibition was upstairs and we headed straight up, even bypassing the cafe, to head into a network or rooms, more complex than a cave system, that hosted all manner of Neanderthal related goodies.

En route, and faster than a hunting rodeo-riding Neanderthal on a squat pre-modern horse, we grabbed copies of the exhibition leaflet in both English and French, and skipped down a corridor before the security guard could wake up.

One of the things that immediately fascinated me about the depiction of Neanderthals in this expo was the urban Homo Sapiens aesthetic that was ascribed to them. This was a recurring theme – Neanderthals were not ‘Neanderthals’ as we crudely characterize and other them, but rather human beings, very much like you and me in many respects.

This urban aesthetic was shaped through critique, with crude stereotypes of Neanderthals juxtaposed with claims to their verbal, intellectual, social and emotional maturity. There was an empathetic ethos that ran through the expo like a vein in a rock.

‘…Neanderthals were above all great hunters, skilled artisans, social beings, stirred by symbolic thoughts, who cared for their family members and buried their dead’. 

‘stirred by symbolic thoughts’

This was conveyed through interactive and often hi-tech displays, alongside some really remarkable skeletal remains including the original type fossil of a skull fragment found in the Neander Valley in Germany in 1856. Something of a holy relic for those who study this period and these people, as was a skull fragment from Saint-Cesaire.

The urban lounge feel of the exhibition was reinforced by a space (2 in the plan below = Take Shelter!) where the floor was  designed to have the appearance of an excavation grid, and excavated features and material culture were depicted using normal conventions at 1:1 scale.

Exhibition layout from the leaflet to accompany the Expo. Numbers are referred to in my text.

This had a lovely brown and orange vibe suggesting Neanderthals had a seventies George and Mildred aesthetic, a compelling juxtaposition that almost demands a fully worked out thought experiment.

Activity area and key locales like hearths were annotated underfoot, based on the actual plan of an excavated Neanderthal site. Yet rather than looking like a campsite, this space looked like a sitcom living room that lacked only a television and standard lamp in the corner. In fact there were televisions, screens showing information about the space. But no drinks trolley in the corner with a pointless decanter and sherry.

I remember seeing a similar conceit used at the Cradle of Scotland exhibition at the Hunterian Museum in Glasgow and Perth Museum and Art Gallery in 2016. Here, 1:1 scale reproductions of archaeological plan drawings of postholes and other features were turned into carpet. This gave the curious effect for me of walking across plan drawings that I actually drew at 1:20 scale as part of the SERF Project and enabled one to navigate a prehistoric space through the medium of shagpile.

Neanderthals were even ascribed a degree of contemporary chic towards the end of the exhibition in a gallery called Neanderthal Today (11 on the plan above) which was next to Comics Corner. But not this 1966 comic book displayed in an earlier room…

No, in comics corner, Neanderthals were Sapienised, with depictions from graphic novels given prominence, and a selection of such books available to read, including depictions of literally urban Neanderthals amidst high-rises and using Levallois tools as mobile phones (fulfilling, as we shall see, a long-existing commuter-Neanderthal trope).

These depictions of Neanderthals have a vibrancy and energy that are compelling and informative, infusing Palaeolithic lives with depth and emotion as many archaeologists studying that period now also do.

But wait! In the middle of this gallery was a slightly creepy Neanderthal figure dressed in contemporary clothes, looking rather like a school teacher, and holding a magazine with a picture of herself on the front cover, Neanderthal introspection in a study of infinite regression.

This did not really surprise me. Dressing Neanderthals up just like us has a long tradition, and it is used as an effective means of conveying similarity over difference, although in  the past this has been done with mixed motivations and levels of seriousness.

Appropriately, in light of the connection with the Paris Metro highlighted at the start of this blog post, there has been a recurring trope of reconstructing Neanderthals (as mannequins, waxworks or just people dressed up with big fake noses on) as commuters, always in smart suits, usually on trains and subways. It is almost as if the state of being-a-commuter is regarded as a universal human trait, and to be fair, I can’t think of any other species, hominid or otherwise, who would waste so much of their life travelling to and from work. This seems to me such as Western, capitalist, vision of humanity, and boy have Neanderthals been sucked into our world.

This is a surprisingly pervasive cliche amongst archaeologists and human anthropologists. Shannon McPherron (Max Planck Institute) said in 2013, “sometimes they’re absolute brutes that have nothing to do with humanity…and other times you put a suit and a hat on a Neanderthal and they could slip on the New York subway train and be unnoticed.” [The Atlantic, August 12, 2013]. Evelyn Jagoda (Harvard) more recently suggested,  “If you saw a Neanderthal dressed in a suit on a train,” Jagoda says, “you would just think it was a slightly ugly guy.” [Atlas Obscura, March 9, 2016]. Hardly flattering stuff and a bit skin deep (or shallow).

But you can see that this Neanderthal-commuter cliche has some heritage….

The original Neanderthal Museum be-suited commuter (source)

Neanderthal Museum waxwork (Creative Commons licence, Einsamer Schutze)

Subway hominid (from BBC2 TV show Neanderthals – Meet your ancestors)

Alan Titchymarsh Neanderthalensis (c) BBC

In actual fact for decades we have been making businessman of Neanderthals, so at least the Expo in Paris mixed up the gender, although it could be argued formal dress was still the order of the day with a businesswoman level of formality. Why do we keep doing this sort of thing?

I want to see Neanderthals in jeans, t-shirts, bikinis, onesies, football strips, high heels, leathers, Alan Partridge stay-pressed-action-slacks. And anywhere other than in an office, on an escalator, or riding a bloody train. Please no more Titchymarsh. There is only so much urban prehistory even I can take.

Homo Partridgensis (photo: Daily Express)

If Neanderthals must wear something, let it be perfume, let it be after-shave, let it be Neandertal.

In case you were wondering, ‘The Neandertal stoneware perfume bottle is slip cast from a flint knapped hand-axe then fired and vitrified at over 1400 degree C. Each bottle is handmade by the artist Kentora Yamada’.

Stick that in your chaine operatoire.

The odour, ‘an overdose of several high-impact, steroidal odorants against lighter aquatic elements’ sounds to me like eau de sweaty commuter, probably that guy out of American Psycho, so it is right on message.

One bright, the other smokier, fucking expensive (image source)

If we are going to urbanize the Neanderthal – make them urbane – then we might as well reflect our mixed-up ancestry by implicating them in all of the things we do and all the people we can be. That is why the comic book and graphic novels on the subject are so powerful (although even one of the examples above as noted depicts Neanderthal-commuters on their lithic mobiles).

The exhibition really stimulated my senses in a way that an overpriced watery scent could never do, and helped me to find a Neanderthal in Paris.

Sources and acknowledgements: thanks to Jan for accompanying me, and for taking some of the photos in this post. I think all other sources of information used are linked to in the post above, happy to be corrected on this if wrong…..

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Levallois

There is something Neanderthal in the suburbs of Paris. Or at least there was.

Line 3 of the Paris Metro terminates in the west at Levallois. So what?

This observation, which I can’t believe I had not thought harder about in the past, led me to an interesting story at the cusp of archaeology as a modern discipline and a new candidate for the label of the first urban prehistorian. It also made me realise that archaeologists often take for granted the familiar labels that we use, and often don’t stop to think about the historiography of these terms and from whence they came.

Levallois is a name most archaeologists should be familiar with, as it is describes a reductive technique used by Neanderthals to make flaked stone tools back in the mists of time. There is a good deal of discussion as to the significance of this method of making tools – to what extent does this indicate the agency of Neanderthals and their ability to think ahead and in abstract terms tens of thousands of years ago? Is this a technique that was recognised, shared and duplicated across a wide geographic area (not restricted to Europe), or is this simply our characterization of a narrow aspect of the archaeological record? Such ‘types’ are the bred and butter of archaeology, for good and for ill.

The Levallois technique (from Monnier 2012, (c) Nature Education)

The attribution of a site name to a type of material culture, architectural style or craft technique has a long tradition in archaeology, although not all terms have had the longetivity of Levallois and often we find modern and more boring ways to describe stuff we find in the archaeological record. My favourite example, now sadly rarely used, is the British late Neolithic pottery style Rinyo-Clacton Ware aka Grooved Ware, only really now known beyond prehistoric archaeology through the name of a Russell Hoban novel. (As another aside, one of the best future urban prehistory novels ever written is Hoban’s Riddley Walker.)

Whither Levallois?

Nathan Schlanger has noted that this Parisian suburb has gained ‘everlasting archaeological notoriety’, as if often the fate of obscure places where a technology or style of object was recognised for the first time.

However, it is not clear exactly when the first Palaeolithic stone tools were recovered from sand quarries in the Levallois-Perret area, but it was probably in the 1850s. At this time Paris was an expanding city surrounded by quarries and urban development.

Monmartre gypsum quarry in the 19th century (source: Written in Stone blog, link below)

Matthew Pope and David Herisson via the medium of twitter suggested that Victor Commont ‘first described’ the Levallois technique, decades after these initial discoveries.

But the earliest publication of the tools themselves was by Jules Reboux. The images below appear to be from the first ever description of these lithics, which came out in 1967. (This is dated 1951 in an online source but this appears to be too early.) Here, Silex Tailles means knapped flints (thanks Becky Wragg Sykes!) and the title of the pamphlet notes the ancient, geological context from which they were found. The specific reductive preparation of the flints was noted here, but it was not yet called Levalloisian.

Image courtesy of David Herrison

 

Knapped (worked) flint from a Levallois quarry (Reboux 1867)

These initial discoveries were courtesy of excavation and fieldwork by Reboux in the 1860s and 1870s. He was a geologist and antiquarian / archaeologist who lived near the edge of Paris at the time, and Schlanger suggests his work in the likes of Levallois and Clichy was akin to proto-rescue archaeology. In fact he appears to have been the first urban prehistorian.

He wrote in 1866 (in French I assume), ‘dedicated research has for long been undertaken in distant lands, when we have under our own feet, in Paris itself, the most certain proofs of the ancient stone industry’. 

Apparently Reboux spend years visiting quarries, monitoring  building sites, and surveying railway cuttings, all around Paris and collected thousands of worked flint tools and objects.

There seems to have been a good deal of innovation around Reboux’s work at, and about, Levallois. Schlanger suggests that one of the sand quarries at Levallois was also the location of one of the earliest documented episodes of ‘comparative experimental flint-knapping’ during a fieldvisit lead by Reboux on 30th August 1867. And Reboux published, in 1873, a stratigraphic section of a quarry at Levallois, one of the first drawings of its kind in an archaeological context ever attempted.

Reboux’s stratigraphic sequence, combining archaeology and geology, based on a section at Levallois-Perret. Published in 1873, reproduced in Schlanger 2013.

It isn’t clear when the objects found at the quarries at Levallois became the objects upon which all similar stone tools were compared in terms of their manufacturing process, although Victor Commont wrote about Levallois tools and debitage in the 1910s, noting differences with other Palaeolithic stone tool ‘industries’.

Commont was credited with bringing the study of the Palaeolithic in northern France into the ‘scientific era’ by Tuffreau. Like Reboux, although decades later, he was an observer of discoveries in quarries, in this case near Amiens, and studied the Quaternary from his home in Edinburgh Street.

The term was further refined and given its classic modern characerisation through new discoveries and experimental flint-knapping in the early to middle twentieth century. Much of this hands-on and intellectual heavy lifting was undertaken by Francois Bordes. A significant figure in Palaeolithic archaeology in the twentieth century, Bordes was responsible for refining our concept of the flake method of Levallois in notable publications during the 1950s such as ‘Technique Levallois et Levallois ancient’ in L’Anthropologie 56 (1952), and in his 1961 book Typologie.

Lewis Binford even had a go at the Levallois in various famous studies around the same times as Bordes, and the concept, and what it tells us about Homo Neandertalensis, is still a very important aspect of Palaeolithic archaeology across the world.

Sadly I have reached the depth of my knowledge about this technique and I have little sense what the current state of play in Palaeolithic studies is with regards the Levallois so apologies to colleagues working in this field! Unless someone wants to write a fictional story called something like Monsieur Levallois comes to town I am unlikely to learn any more.

However, there is one thing left for me to do. It is clear that a visit to Levallois itself by Metro is needed to bring this narrative to a satisfactory conclusion and I’ll do this next time I’m in Paris. I’ll remember to pack a cow….

‘Man pushing a cow into a bus’ (photographer unknown)

 

Sources and acknowledgements: I’m indebted to the many Palaeolithic experts who responded to my plea for information on twitter (link in text above) and directly to emails. Thanks especially to Nathan Schlanger and Dene Wright who helped me via email, as well as the following tweeters.

• David Herrison = @david_herisson
• Joseba Rios-Garaizar = @jorios
• Matt Pope = @MatthewPope
• Becky Wragg Sykes = @LeMoustier
• Helen Loney = @Worsted2

Apologies if I missed anyone, and these good folks cannot be held responsible for how I have mangled their responses and pointers to sources of help….and most of the quotes in this post have benefited from the translation skills of others such as Schlanger.

The following academic sources were also consulted in preparing this blog post:

• Pettit, P. 2009 Francois Bordes. In R. Hosfield, F. Wenban-Smith & M. Pope (eds) Great prehistorians: 150 years of Palaeolithic research, 1859-2009, pages 201-212. Lithic Studies Society, London.
• Schlanger, N. 1996 Understanding Levallois: Lithic technology and cognitive archaeology. Cambridge Archaeological Journal 6.2, 231-54.
• Schlanger, N. 2013 One day hero. Jules Reboux at the crucible of prehistory in 1860s Paris. Complutum 24.2, 73-88.
• Tuffreau, A. 2009 Victor Commont. In R. Hosfield, F. Wenban-Smith & M. Pope (eds) Great prehistorians: 150 years of Palaeolithic research, 1859-2009. Lithic Studies Society, London.

A sense of the mining landscape that was nineteenth century Paris can be gained by reading this fascinating blog post about Paris’s historic gypsum quarries (Written in Stone blog). This was also the source of the Montmartre quarry picture.

The source of the Levallois technique drawing is another interesting source (find it here): Monnier, G. (2012) Neanderthal Behavior. Nature Education Knowledge 3(10):11

 

Illustrations (unless source given in the caption)

Hoban and Typologie book covers – widely available online

Stone tool drawing – this was reproduced in Schlanger 2013, but the original drawing was published in 1867 in the following place:

• Reboux, J. 1867 Silex tailles associes a des ossements fossiles dans les terrains quaternaires de environs de Paris. Congres international d’archaeologie et d’anthropologie prehistorique, 2e session: 103-9.

Stratigraphic section from the quarry at Levallois – again this was reproduced in Schlanger 2013, but the original drawing was published in 1873 here:

• Reboux, J. 1873 Des trois epoques de la pierre. Bulletin de la societe d’anthropologie de Paris 8, 523-31.

Victor Commont from Tuffreau 2009.

 

 

 

 

 

Sources and acknowledgements: thanks to Dene Wright for information on the Levallois technique.

 

Monnier, G. (2012) Neanderthal Behavior. Nature Education Knowledge 3(10):11