The Golden-Bristled Boar: Last Ferocious Beast of the Forest

ELEVEN: The Divine Beast

Chapter Eleven The Divine Beast B oars, mammoths, modern humans, and Neanderthals coexistedintheregionwherewehaveourcountryhome .Ihadn’t thought about this until I walked into a nearby church obscured in scaffolding and masonry dust and saw an elaborate display of man-madestoneartifactsspanningfromtheearlyPleistoceneeratothe beginningoftheHolocene.Thevillageof Saint-Privéisonlyeightmiles fromusandthreemilesfromthestoriedchateauof Saint-Fargeau,where somehallsaresoclutteredwithboar-anddeer-trophylegsthatthewalls resemble cuneiform tablets. The Saint-Privé exhibition was meticulously arranged to show the technical evolution in tool making from the crudely chipped Lower Paleolithic artifacts to intricately hewn flint from the Mesolithic and early Neolithic periods. The caramel-colored flint, or silex in French, is a form of quartz so common in our region that our house is built from it. In the fields, you can find silex in rounded shapes reminiscent of Henry Moore sculptures. When flaked, it takes on a sharp, durable edge. The earliest Europeans utilized flint to make points, scrapers, knives, hammers, axes, awls, stakes, and hoes. The exhibition included tools to make tools: chipping stones and arrow-shaft files. The entire collection came from farmland on a ridge less than three miles from the Saint-Privé church, and the owner, a thin man with a well-groomed beard and self-tinting glasses, stood authoritatively beside the exhibition he had assembled. This was André Huchet. The exhibition drew two other locals, who chatted with each other, leaving me the opportunity to ask Huchet how he began collecting his relics. the divine beast • 111 “It didn’t happen right away,” he responded. “I came here from the Orleans area in the 1970s, and I leased the farm over there that I now own. I always knew the earliest Europeans lived along the valley, and thattheareawasamajormigrationrouteforlargeanimals.Then,inthe 1980s, I started finding tools.” “Do you have your first find here?” “Itwasthisone.”Hepickedupamilkygray,heart-shapedstone,with large cloven surfaces on both sides, and placed it in my palm. “When I saw this stone in the field,” he said with satisfaction, “I knew it was exceptional.” Thepointwasclearlyintendedforhuntinglargeandoftendangerous animals: aurochs, bison, stags, boars. Not far away is Arcy-sur-Cure, a major site with parietal and portable art as well as artifacts from both a Neanderthal and a modern Homo sapiens presence. At Soucy, another Paleolithic site in our department, excavations reveal that boars then as now were among the game animals hunted in our area. Monsieur Huchet invited me to his home the following Sunday, and I was astonished to see that he had transformed the entire second floor of his farmhouse into a showcase for his finds. He had set up pedagogical charts and pictures showing animal-migration routes and Paleolithic sites with parietal art and artifacts. After a brief lecture on stone toolmaking, he showed me a comic book on the history of Burgundy. It pictured his younger self descending from a tractor and finding the triangular stone I’d held. The next frame shows Huchet hallucinating a stegosaurus, a brontosaurus, and a pterodactyl. “I’mjusta petitpaysan,nothingbutafarmer,butevenIknowthatthe periods of early man and the dinosaur don’t coincide.” Huchet’s selfdeprecating “petit paysan”hadabitter edge. His richarchaeologicalsite and his important finds have received no recognition from the French scientificestablishmentbecauseHuchetisnotadegreedpaleontologist andhasnotfollowedscientificproceduresformarkingandmappinghis discoveries. French academic snobbery is legendary. One of the most infamous examples was the sneering disrespect shown Don Marcelino Sanz de Sautuolaafterheandhisnine-year-olddaughterdiscoveredthenow-re- 112 • the golden-bristled boar nownedcavedrawingsatAltamira.Sautuolawasridiculedandevenaccusedofforgery .Thesnobberyherewastwofold:notonlywasSautuola dismissed as a fraud, but Paleolithic man was considered too “savage” to have produced such sophisticated renderings. Only after Sautuola’s deathdidenoughevidenceaccrue,paradoxicallyfromPaleolithicfinds in France, to force his critics to regret their condemnation. When you see the Altamira animals, primarily bison in numerous positions and natural activities depending on the conformation of the stone, you almost have to sympathize with Sautuola’s detractors: the paintings are nuanced, beautiful, and strangely modern. Altamira has a pair of images that are presumed to be boars among a swirl of bison. One image, which has been interpreted as one of the earliest attempts atanimation,depictswhatappearstobeaboarwitheightlegs,suggesting motion. I wanted to see the boars, even in facsimile, at Altamira and talked Mary into an impulsive 800-mile drive to the medieval town of Santillana del Mar in northern Spain. We broke up our drive with a night nearthevillageSalies-de-Béarn.Legendhasitthatamortallywounded boar in the Pyrénées-Atlantique region of France led its pursuers into a swamp. When the hunters finally found the animal, it was preserved in salt crystals, and upon salt...