"Le Ruth"

During a hike, exploring my new environment, I accidentely dropped in the prehistoric site of "Le Ruth". As I was looking what it might be about a door opened and a man asked whether I was interested in a visit. I said yes and he showed me inside his basement a huge collection of stone tools found on his property by his grandfather in 1910. His grandfather was a farmer and was looking in an opening in the rocks to find out where the whether there would be some water. As he was digging in the soil he found a huge amount of prehistoric tools. It was the time that there were several discoveries of prehistoric shelters, burial places and caves in the area. And it had just been scientifically acknowledged that indeed this was extremely old prehistoric stuff. With the excitement of descovering new continents several farmers were investigating their property and a lot was found. 
The kind man did give me a fist axe in my hand from Neanderthal people. Showed me how cleverly it was crafted exactly fitting the palm and giving extra holes for the fingers to have a firm grip. Then he put a scraper in my hand to clean animal skins only 25.000 years ago crafted, it fitted my hand perfectly and could be hold in 3 different ways for different parts of the skin treated. 
So different from visiting a museum. There were also laying 2 skulls from a medieval burial place around the year 600, probably belonging to the first christian people in the area.
He showed me a picture of his grandfather together with the famous abbey Breuil and other well known archeologists of that time. It has been the great passion of his grandfathers life and he learned a lot about it. But then the Government declared that you can only own the surface of your land and that everything found in the soil belonged to the State. They came and took the major part of his grandfathers collection to bring in to a museum close to Paris. Off coarse further explorations of the property stopped then.

Some photo's of the collection in the basement:

This extraordinary location turned out to be inhabited as long as there have been people living in Western Europe. After his basement with that very special collection he showed me the little cave were all those tools were found, and the location where the prehistoric people probably had their shelter, then another little hole in the rocks were water has been running and some bones were found from prehistoric animals also fossils from the time long before human life on this earth.

On a third location in the garden from medieval times till very recently people had carved sheds in the rocks and the old burial place with sarcophagus which was found by the grandfather was there. 

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