Archaeology: 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.