Digging up debate in a French cave
By Bruce Bower
From San Juan, Puerto Rico, at the Paleoanthropology Society and Society for American Archaeology meeting
More than 50 years ago, Henri Delporte excavated a French cave known as Grotte des Fées at Châtelperron. He unearthed many large stone tools characteristic of Neandertals as well as a surprise: small, sharpened points seemingly made by the species toward the end of its evolutionary run. Archaeologists have attributed the finds, now known from several western European sites, to a final phase of Neandertal culture called the Châtelperronian.