A group of archaeologists announced on Thursday the discovery of small limestone slabs engraved with profiles of horses and a vulva, more than 18,000 years old, at a site in southeast France.

Specialists from the National Institute for Preventive Archaeological Research (Inrap, for its French acronym) have been working on the site since 2015 before it was turned into a landfill in the Nîmes region.

The objects found range from 20,000 to 16,000 years before our era, a period similar to that of rock art in the famous Lascaux cave in southwestern France.

But according to experts, there was human presence in that place until the sixteenth century.

The slightly elevated site of Bellegarde was probably chosen as a stopping point by nomadic peoples because it has a spring and suggests a good view of the herds of wild horses crossing the plain.

In 2016, after eleven months of excavations, archaeologists uncovered 100,000 sculpted flint objects (weapons and tools), animal bones and shells used as ornaments, some of which date back to the early Magdalenian period, more than 22,000 years ago.

But the most exciting moment was when, while cleaning the objects, they discovered two small fragments of limestone with profiles of horses, in which the eyes, the mane and the muzzle are clearly distinguished.

These engravings “are among the oldest known works of this paleolithic culturejust like the cave paintings and engravings in the Lascaux cave,” said Vincent Mourre, one of the archaeologists responsible for the excavations.

In another more recent fragment an engraving was discovered which can be interpreted as a vulva framed by the upper legsas well as “thin engravings, difficult to interpret”, on a slab of about 50 centimeters.

According to the official Inrap website, en a more recent level (middle Magdalenian, -16,000), an exceptional engraving appears interpreted as a vulva, figured in an exaggerated and disproportionate way, framed by the upper legs.

Depictions of isolated vulvas on slabs and blocks are known from some older (Aurignacian) sites in the Dordogne. In the Magdalenian, the examples documented up to then were mostly wall paintings, both in Spain and in southwest France. The provision that includes a pubic triangle attached to two legs is great and has only one known equivalent, on a wall of the cave of Cazelle, in the Dordogne.

Bellagarde site

The paleolithic site of Bellegarde was explored on approximately 2,000 m² by Inrap archaeologists in 2016. The expansion of a waste burial triggered a preventive archaeological excavation.

The site bears witness to an exceptional succession of occupations divided into five major phases spanning approximately 6,000 years and crossing almost the entire Magdalenian, from -20,000 to -14,000.

The sequence benefited from 17 remarkably consistent carbon-14 dates. These homogeneous, representative and well-dated assemblages make the Bellegarde site a reference on a regional and national scale.

Sources: AFP and Inrap