Message #735

[Brooke]

July 5, 2000

A cradle in the wrong place

We have all been taught that the cradle of civilization was in the Middle East, but a prehistoric village in the south of France suggests that Europe has a rival claim

Michael Bradley National Post

Henry Lincoln Stone huts, called capitelles, in the Narbonnais region. Their age is unknown, but their floor plans are very like the foundations at a perplexing Neolithic site in the same region.

In November, 1985, Julia Roussot-Larroque, director of Historical Research for France's Centre National de Recherche Scientifique (CNRS), supervised what proved to be an unnerving discovery. At the excavation of a prehistoric site in Provence, some 50 kilometres northeast of Marseilles, there were uncovered the remains of small stone houses arranged as if on a street. At the doorways of the houses were massive slabs. Most remarkably, bones of domesticated sheep were found along with kernels of grain. French scientists concluded that the inhabitants had been a previously unknown people who had begun the tradition of "megalithic" structures. The kernels of grain and animal remains were carbon-14-dated to 7000-6000 BC.

Roussot-Larroque called this culture "Cardial" after a type of seashell that was the most common item in the kitchen garbage heaps of this Neolithic people.

Then, in early 1986, a CNRS team found that the Cardials had also reached and settled Corsica in significant numbers in about 7000 BC. They had brought their sheep with them, so they must have had boats capable of carrying people and livestock 200 kilometres across the sea between Corsica and the Côte d'Azur.

The Cardials had constructed megaliths on Corsica, too. Megalithic houses and supposed "temples" and "tombs" had long been known on Sardinia, Sicily, Malta, Crete and Cyprus. These ruins were mysteries. Who built them? When? Roussot-Larroque's discoveries suggested that the Cardials of mainland France had started the megalithic tradition and carried it to the Mediterranean islands as well as to the Atlantic coasts of Brittany and Britain. In northwest Europe, after a few thousand years, it had culminated in Stonehenge and Carnac. But who were the Cardials?

Cardial C-14 datings from 7000 BC were unnerving because they were so close to the very earliest Neolithic radiocarbon dates from the Near East. Grains were cultivated at Jericho in about 6000-8000 BC. Domesticated cattle are known from the site of Çatal Hüyük in southern Turkey in about 7000-8000 BC. The early Cardial radiocarbon dates caused a stir in scientific journals. The new data were incorporated in the 1987 edition of the Larousse Histoire de la France. Cardial dating didn't cause a dramatic sensation only because they were still slightly later -- just barely -- than the established and accepted Near Eastern origin for the "Neolithic revolution."

Then, the Syrian site at Jerf el-Ahmar was discovered and excavated (1996-1998). Conventional-minded archeologists breathed a sigh of relief. Jerf el-Ahmar's C-14 dates were a comfortable 9000 BC, superseding Jericho and Çatal Hüyük, and putting a little more time between the Cardials and the Near Eastern Neolithic.

But there was a problem. Jerf el-Ahmar also revealed engraved pictograms containing "messages dating back to several millennia before the invention of writing," in the words of a January, 1999, CNRS information release. What was going on?


Archeologists were uneasy, but with the Syrian C-14 dates, the idea could still be maintained that Cardials had come from the Near East and then had spread to the Mediterranean islands, to the French Mediterranean coast and then on to the Atlantic coast of northwest Europe. A CNRS map (from January, 1999) of Cardial migration illustrates this supposed route and direction. The crucial innovations of agriculture and animal domestication, the foundation of civilization, could still be attributed to the Near East.

But not any longer. In August, 1999, in a discovery so recent it has not yet been published in scientific journals, let alone the popular press, a CNRS team excavated a prehistoric site at Viols-le-Fort some 60 airline kilometres north of Narbonne. They found the familiar Cardial stone houses, megalithic-style doorways and domesticated grains and sheep bones. The date? Two thousand years before any evidence of the Neolithic age in Asia Minor or Palestine: 10,000 BC. This news was leaked to the world by Gérard Bardon, editor of L'Almanach du Languedoc, who covered the Viols-le-Fort excavation and who had cordial relations with the CNRS team. Bardon received confirmation of the radiocarbon dates in time to include them in the 2000 edition of L'Almanach du Languedoc, which went to press in October, 1999.

Stone huts with the same kind of floor plans as those at Viols-le-Fort are still intact at Rennes-le-Château in the same region, and are known locally as capitelles. Their age is unknown.


A CNRS release on the dating of the Viols-le-Fort site was scheduled for June, 2000, but has been postponed. If the dating is officially confirmed, the conventional view of civilization's development will have to be dramatically altered. Instead of the usual "Light from the East" account of the beginnings and spreading of civilization, Viols-le-Fort suggests that much, or even most, of civilization's light may have come from the West.

CNRS archeologists have now discovered that the surprising Neolithic Cardial culture seems to have originally been concentrated within a radius of 100 kilometres of Narbonne. This region, known as the Narbonnais, is a fan-shaped lowland facing the Mediterranean. To the north and west are the Black Mountains and the Massif Central. To the south are the jagged and forbidding Pyrenees. They squeeze the Garonne-Aude river system at Carcassonne, from which the Narbonnais lowland fans out on to the Mediterranean coast.

The sites of Pech Maho and Ensérune are also in the Narbonnais. They were excavated between 1954 and 1979 and dated to about 600 BC because alphabetic writing was discovered at both places. True, both the script and the language at Pech Maho and Ensérune were previously unknown, but the "Light from the East" dogma was so strong that any early writing in Western Europe was automatically assigned a date around 600-800 BC . The closer to the Near East it was, the older it was allowed to be (back to 1600 BC at the earliest). Now, however, these inscriptions are being carefully "re-investigated." Possibly, these strange alphabetic inscriptions date from 9000-10,000 BC, in view of the nearby Cardial sites and that mysterious script at Jerf el-Ahmar dated at 9000 BC.

Did the Neolithic arts of agriculture, animal domestication and village living come from Western Europe? Could even alphabetic writing have come from the West? If so, a fundamental reappraisal of Western civilization will shake our ideas of history during the next few years.

Copyright © 2000 National Post Online

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