Welcome to Les Eyzies in the heart of the Vézère Valley, often called the “Capital of Prehistory.” This UNESCO World Heritage site area is home to some of the most significant prehistoric sites in the world. This guide focuses on two must-visit locations: the Pôle d’Interprétation de la Préhistoire (Prehistory Welcome Center) and the Grotte de Font-de-Gaume, one of the last caves with original polychrome paintings still open to the public.
Prehistory Welcome Center – Consider starting your prehistoric exploration at the Pole d-Interpretation de la Prehistoire (PIP). You’ll pass it as you enter Les Eyzies from the east (Sarlat). This glass-and-concrete facility is a helpful resource for planning a visit to the region’s important prehistoric sites.
The low-slung building houses timelines, a good eight-minute file (English subtitles), and exhibits that work together to give visitors a primer on the origins of humanity. After visiting, walk out the center’s back door 200 yards on a quiet lane to the National Museum of Prehistory.
National Museum of Prehistory – This well-presented, modern museum houses more than 18,000 bones, stones, and crude little doodads that were uncovered locally. It takes you through prehistory – starting 400,000 years ago – and is good preparation for your cave visits.
Appropriately located on a cliff inhabited by humans for 35,000 years, the museum’s sleek design is intended to help it blend into the surrounding rock. Inside, the many worthwhile exhibits include videos demonstrating scratched designs, painting techniques, an dhow spearheads were made.
You’ll also see full-size models of Cro-Magnon people and animals that stare at racks of arrowheads. The museum’s handheld English explanations require patience to correlate to the exhibits.
In the Museum, we meet one of our ancestors – a 10-year old Turkana Boy, whose bone fragments were found in Kenya in 1984 by Richard Leakey and date from 1.5 million years ago. The first floor sets the stage by describing human evolution and the fundamental importance of tools. We see a life-size re-creation of Megaloceros – a gigantic deer (with even bigger antlers) – and a skeleton of an oversized steppe bison, both of which appear in some of the area’s cave paintings.
The more engaging second floor highlights prehistoric artifacts found in France. Some of the most interesting objects we saw: a handheld arrow launcher, a 5,000-year-old flat-bottomed boat (pirogue) made from oak, prehistoric fire pits, amazing cavewoman jewelry (including a necklace labeled La Parure de St-Germain-la-Riviere, made of 70 stag teeth – pretty impressive, given that stags only have two teeth each), engravings on stone (especially the unflattering yet impressively realistic female figure), a handheld lamp used to light cave interiors (lampe faconnee, found at Lascaux), and beautiful replicas of horses (much like the sculptures at the cave of Abri du Cap Blanc).
The visit ends on the cliff edge, with a Fred Flintstone-style photo op on a stone ledge (through a short tunnel) that some of our ancient ancestors once called home.
Grotte de Font-de-Gaume – Even if you’re not a connoisseur of Cro-Magnon art, you’ll dig this cave – the last one in France with prehistoric multicolored (polychrome) paintings still open to the public.
This cave, made millions of years ago – not by a river, but by the geological activity that created the Pyrenees Mountains – is entirely natural. It contains 15,000-year-old paintings of 230 animals, 82 of which are bison.
On the carefully guided and controlled 100-yard walk, we saw about 20 red-and-black bison, a few horses, and a reindeer – often in elegant motion – painted with a moving sensitivity. Often, when two animals face each other, one is black, and the other is red.
Our guide, with a laser pointer and great reverence, will trace the faded outline of the animals and explain how, over 15 millennia in the past, cave dwellers used local materials and the rock’s natural contours to give the paintings dimension. Some locals knew about the cave long ago, when there was little interest in prehistory, but the paintings were officially discovered in 1901 by the village schoolteacher.
