Man's Oldest Dwelling

The construction machinery chewed away at the hill in Nice, digging out the foundation for a new luxury apartment building. Suddenly one of the sidewalk superintendents erupted with excitement. "Stop!" he shouted at a bulldozer operator: "Don't let anyone do any work near this spot." Reluctantly the workman obeyed. Dr. Henry de Lumley, 30, an archaeological specialist in the late paleolithic civilization, had the authority of the French Ministry of Culture behind him, and among the stones scooped up by the bulldozer, he had recognized some hand-hewed tools of prehistoric man.

Building operations on the hill stopped while a team of 15 archaeologists including De Lumley's wife, Marie-Antoinette, moved in, first with a bull dozer, then with trowels, knives, surgical instruments and brushes to carefully scrape away the dirt. "In removing 32 ft. of soil," De Lumley says, "we stripped away 200,000 years of man's history."

Position Is Important. There, beneath layers of clay and stones, were the unmistakable traces of a dwelling built by man on the shores of the Mediterranean 200,000 years ago. "It is certainly the oldest organized human dwelling yet dug up," says Sorbonne Prehistorian Andre Leroi-Gourhan. France's fore most authority on paleontology, Profes sor Jean Piveteau, is equally emphatic. "It appears to show that prehistoric man already had a certain social organization 200,000 years ago." Before the Nice discovery, the oldest known man-made dwelling, dating from around 150,000 years ago, was unearthed in southern Italy, but it contained far fewer and less interesting remnants.

De Lumley and his diggers uncovered the remains of a structure about 60 ft. by 20 ft., which contained two fireplaces. Scattered about were pieces of charred wood and the bones of rabbits, boars, Elephas antiquus (the ancestors of mammoths), deer antlers, stone carving tools, and even fossilized human excrement, which, the archaeologist says, is "extremely rare."

From several holes in the ground, one as large as 12 inches in diameter, De Lumley has deduced that the roof of the dwelling was supported by beams or tree trunks. The people who lived there may have been pre-Neanderthal men, like those who inhabited a cave discovered earlier in Nice.

The area immediately around the fireplaces is clear of debris, which seems to indicate that the inhabitants of the house slept near the fires on animal skins. There are several large flat stones scattered about, which may have been used as seats or for carving meat. The most important thing, says De Lumley, "is not so much the bones and the tools found on a prehistoric site as their relative positioning." From this, it is possible to learn a great deal about the life and the social habits of prehistoric man.

No Human Fossils. From the size of the building it is reasonable to conjecture that it was inhabited by a group of no more than 15 persons. The inhabitants of the Riviera site were clearly hunters, not fishermen, for no fish fossils or sea shells have been uncovered. And there is evidence that the site was only a temporary dwelling; had it been a permanent home, there would have been more bones and tools around. In fact, because he has found the outlines of as many as five different dwellings on the Nice hillsite, De Lumley has decided that prehistoric hunters must have come back to the Mediterranean littoral periodically, built temporary dwellings there, and then have gone away.

No human fossils have been un earthed so far, nor does De Lumley think that any will be found. The scarcity of human fossils predating Neanderthal man is, in fact, one of the great archaeological blanks, making it difficult to reconstruct human life of hundreds of thousands of years ago. But the age of the dwelling has been conclusively dated from surrounding geological formations, which have been carefully studied over the past century. And corroborating evidence comes from paleontological finds, such as the presence of the Helix pareti snails, which are known to have disappeared during the Second (Mindel-Riss) Interglacial Period.

When fully explored and analyzed, De Lumley's discovery may compel a drastic reassessment of the social organization and civilization of pre-Neanderthal man in Europe. Until now, working with the meager data available, scientists have been convinced that, unlike the men who inhabited the Riviera site, the creatures of the Second Interglacial Period lived in the open or sought shelter in caves. They were clearly far more civilized than that.

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