Section I

The Caves

Six cave sites along the Meuse and its tributaries, each with the commune it sits in, the excavator who worked it and what the material established. Nothing here about visiting them.

• 01EngisSchmerling excavated a fossil skull here in 1829 that was the first Neanderthal ever found, three decades before the Neander valley named the species and a century before anyone recognised what it was.
• 02SpyThe 1886 excavation produced skeletons that settled the argument, and it did so because the excavators recorded which layer they came from.
• 03GoyetA large cave system dug from the 1860s whose material is still being re-examined with methods nobody then imagined.
• 04Trou Al'WesseA site worked by modern campaigns to modern standards, which is what makes it useful for checking the old ones.
• 05ChaleuxOne of Dupont's Lesse valley caves, dug fast and in quantity.
• 06RamioulFound in 1911 by a local society, in quarried limestone country on the edge of an industrial valley.