the velvet galactic

Big Bend National Park

Premont, Texas

A quotidian morning in Buenos Aires.

Ransom K. Fern

Kurt Vonnegut, The Sirens of Titan (1959) Chapter 3, page 66

Ed Yong reports on a recent, major discovery about the distant ancestors of homo sapiens in A Shocking Find In a Neanderthal Cave In France:

Some 336 meters into the cave, the caver stumbled across something extraordinary—a vast chamber where several stalagmites had been deliberatelybroken. Most of the 400 pieces had been arranged into two rings—a large one between 4 and 7 metres across, and a smaller one just 2 metres wide. Others had been propped up against these donuts. Yet others had been stacked into four piles. Traces of fire were everywhere, and there was a mass of burnt bones.  

These weren’t natural formations, and they weren’t the work of bears. They were built by people.

Recognizing the site’s value, the caver brought in archaeologist Francois Rouzaud. Using carbon-dating, Rouzaud estimated that a burnt bear bone found within the chamber was 47,600 years old, which meant that the stalagmite rings were older than any known cave painting. It also meant that they couldn’t have been the work of Homo sapiens. Their builders must have been the only early humans in the south of France at the time: Neanderthals.