![]() ![]() But we have some idea what they looked like, because they were Neanderthals. We don’t know who these people were or why they did any of this. But they or their fellows returned more than once to build further fires amidst the stone rings. There was no cooking or butchering in the cave, which lies about a thousand feet down a narrow passage, and without any means of venting the smoke of their torches and fires the air must have been choking. And then they lit fires, beside and on top of the structure itself. In a few places they stacked more stones, for all the world like the ruins of some classical temple, in piles. The stones were layered atop each other (up to four levels in some places) and carefully braced to build the walls of the rings. There they broke some four hundred stalagmites from the ground and used the central cylindrical pieces - more than two tons of them -to build a pair of enormous circles. One hundred seventy-five thousand years ago, a group of people carried torches deep into a cave in what is now the southwest of France. ![]() Kindred: Neanderthal Life, Love, Death and Art, Rebecca Wragg Sykes (Bloomsbury, 2020). ![]()
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