Bruniquel cave in France contains circular structures made of broken stalagmitesEtienne FABRE/SSAC
Around 175,000 years ago, Neanderthals ventured deep inside a cave in what is now France, broke off stalagmites and used them to build mysterious circular structures. Later on, bears moved in and obliterated almost all of the footprints and other traces they left on the cave floor – apart from an impression in clay that could be the kneeprint of a kneeling Neanderthal.
“It’s just a hypothesis,” says Sophie Verheyden at the Royal Belgian Institute of Natural Sciences. “To be sure of that, we need a lot of imprints of knees to compare it to.”
The stalagmite circles were discovered in the 1990s in Bruniquel cave, near Toulouse in south-west France, and described in a 2016 paper by a team including Verheyden.
While ancient human footprints are well known and well studied, ancient kneeprints have never been investigated before, as far as Verheyden is aware. To start doing this, she and her colleagues plan to ask people to kneel in a variety of clays to see what impressions are left.
