Bruniquel Cave
The village of Bruniquel
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 Location in France
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| Location | east of Montauban |
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| Region | France |
| Coordinates | 44°3′51″N 1°40′33″E / 44.06417°N 1.67583°ECoordinates: 44°3′51″N 1°40′33″E / 44.06417°N 1.67583°E |
| History | |
| Periods | Palaeolithic |
Bruniquel Cave is an archeological site near Bruniquel, in an area which has many paleolithic sites, east of Montauban in southwestern France. Annular (ring) and accumulation (pile) structures made of broken stalagmites have been found 336 metres from the cave entrance. Traces of fire were also found. The constructions have been dated to around 176 thousand years ago.
In a letter to Nature reporting the discovery in 2016, Jacques Jaubert and his co-authors state that the structures are of anthropogenic origin, and as early Neanderthals were the only humans in the area at that time, they must have been the builders, a conclusion which is accepted by Chris Stringer of the Natural History Museum in London.
The discovery shows that early Neanderthals were capable of building more elaborate structures than previously realised, and that they had a more complex social organisation than previously thought. The modern human Aurignacian culture, over 100,000 years later, is not known to have produced constructions in caves.
Bruniquel cave was closed naturally during the , and no one entered it until cavers dug through the collapsed entrance in 1990. A plan was made of the structures in the early 1990s, and a burnt bone was C14 dated to over 47,600 years, but research stopped after the death of the lead archeologist, and it was unclear whether the structures could be attributed to the Neanderthals. In 2013, Jacques Jaubert and his colleagues decided to study and date the structures, and they published a letter outlining the results of their research in Nature in 2016.
The structures have been dated by uranium series dating as 176.5 (±2.1) thousand years old, with 2σ uncertainties (95.5% probability). There are two annular structures, one 6.7 by 4.5 metres, and the other 2.2 by 2.1 metres, composed of one to four aligned layers of stalagmites, with some small pieces placed inside the layers to support them. Some stalagmites were placed vertically against the rings, possibly as reinforcement. There are also four stacks of stalagmites between 0.55 and 2.60 metres in diameter, two of which were inside the large ring and two outside it. Around 400 stalagmite pieces (called "speleofacts" by the researchers) were used, with a total length of 112.4 metres and weight of around 2.2 tons.
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Wikipedia