Has the oldest “prehistoric card” on the planet been found in Île-de-France? | EUROtoday

On Apr 11, 2025

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NBone distant ancestors recovered, like us, to playing cards to seek out their approach of their atmosphere. Several engraved plans have been recognized right here and there world wide. In France, certainly one of these most well-known plans seems within the reserves of the National Archeology Museum of Saint-Germain-en-Laye since 1924. It is the Saint-Bélec slab, present in Brittany firstly of the XX^e century.

Another of those playing cards was noticed in 2005 on a Rocher in Mont-Saint-Michel. Old from 4 millennia, these representations of geographic areas usually are not remoted circumstances. An article revealed within the prestigious Oxford Journal of Archaeologyfinal December, thus evokes the existence of one other card of this kind in a sous-Roche shelter simply 60 km south of Paris.

The authors of this publication, Médard Thiry and Anthony Milnes, respectively researchers on the École des Mines de Paris and Adelaide University (Australia), clarify that they’ve recognized a 3 -dimensional illustration of house relationship from practically fourteen millennia. Which would make it the oldest plan within the historical past of humanity.

A identified prehistoric web site

The examine of the 2 scientists pertains to a engraved rock positioned within the segognole cave within the coronary heart of the Fontainebleau forest massif. The place is thought for its monumental sandstone clusters on which climbing lovers prepare. Three caves had been inhabited there on the Paleolithic period as evidenced by rock engravings, found in 1860.

Read too In the footsteps of the very first EuropeansThese works Dated from the Mesolithic signify horses but in addition what paleontologists assume they’re a feminine intercourse, minimize within the rock, and which they’ve nicknamed “the origin of the world” in reference to the portray by Gustave Courbet exhibited on the Musée d’Orsay.

A analysis program coordinated by the prehistorian Boris Valentin, professor of archeology at Panthéon Sorbonne University, expressed the concept these engravings can be the work of hunter-gatherers who had established strategic camps on the sting of the Seine, on the migratory roads of enormous recreation.

Testimonials from hunter-gatherers

Close to those drawings, Médard Thiry and Anthony Milnes noticed, in 2017, sculpted parts blended with traces of pure erosion which appeared to them as a miniature illustration of the panorama, engraved within the floor. The put on and tear of the patterns makes it tough to learn this scheme. But, based on researchers, it’s a assertion of rivers within the area.

Read too Jean-Jacques Hublin: “The examine of prehistory has leaps from large from Lucy! »» According to them, there are a number of vital geomorphological parts there: rocky platters with ponds, a river with a number of arms evoking the swamps that occupied the premises earlier than being drained, a basin which may correspond to a strangulation of the present valley and one other space of water assortment, decrease.

Plan for searching?

This three -dimensional illustration of the native hydrographic community might have served to mark a territory, plan hunts, even transmit data. It would reveal, based on Médard Thiry and Anthony Milnes, a superb understanding of the atmosphere.

Read too Prehistoric caves on the market within the Vézère ValleyThe symbolism of this scheme would particularly affirm the intelligence of members of prehistoric societies. This discovery, which mixes experience in geomorphology, geology of alterations and archeology, is just not unanimously unanimous inside the scientific group.

Subject of scientific argument

The prehistorian Boris Valentin has issued many reservations concerning the interpretation that the 2 authors of the article make this engraving. “Nothing in [leur] publication proves that slots have been widened by humans. And if we managed to demonstrate it, second problem, no key of interpretation exists for this kind of interlacing. The geologist offers approximate visual reconciliations with local geography. But it could just as well be the description of the blood vessels of an animal unlocked by hunter-gatherers, a net for hunting, vegetation, “he mentioned.

Médard Thiry refutes in block the arguments of this paleontologist. According to him, the community has been analyzed and its nature evaluated intimately. In an extended proper of response, revealed on the net journal “Hominidae”, the geologist signifies that “the geometries of connections (in particular the curves in the cracks) are not natural fracture connections: these are straight and does not deviate from another fracture, as explained in the methodology part”.

To uncover

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Answer

He provides that “the furrows surrounding the quartzitic sandstone mounds of the floor cannot be due to erosions by natural water flows because, if it was, they would not circumscribe the mounds but diverge according to the strongest slope. The sinuosities of the furrows also overlap any fractures which are straight on this scale ”.

The researcher of the Center of Geosciences of the School of Mines and the University of Paris Sorbonne concludes by stressing having “detailed eight particular structural relations between the water movement paths and the reliefs on the ground of the shelter and the [avoir] Compared to eight comparable structural traits of native geography. These are eight factors of similarity, a few of that are repeated a number of instances ”.

https://www.lepoint.fr/science/la-plus-vieille-carte-prehistorique-au-monde-a-t-elle-ete-decouverte-en-ile-de-france-11-04-2025-2587136_25.php