Argo

France - 14-Apr-23 -

We managed to visit three of the four caves proposed under the name “Neanderthal fossil caves in Wallonia” in April 2023 : Spy, Scladina and Goyet.

Spy cave was already reviewed : as mentioned, this is more a shelter than a cave. It is well sign-posted from the car park and can be accessed at any time following a pleasant and easy walk in a wood. On that Sunday morning, the other people we met were doing some exercise or just enjoying the sunshine, and the cave could easily be missed or overlooked. There is nothing left from Neanderthal, just a plaque remembering those who discovered pieces of skeleton here (the famous “Homme de Spy” was found in 1886). We did not visit the nearby museum : its limited opening time did not fit well with our agenda.

Scladina (see picture) was by far the most interesting of the three caves, in my opinion, for still being an active archaeological site. Tours are by pre-booking only (25 people maximum per group) and usually operate on Sundays – and on some bank holidays : one tour in the morning in Dutch, one tour in the afternoon (at 2 pm) in French ; we joined the latter, with twelve other visitors. Check the website for detailed agenda and booking. You pay only upon arrival (cash or credit card). The tour was guided by a Scientist who was very nice and was able to explain her work with simple words, so even the kids felt interested. Successive overflows from nearby river and deposits of mud filled the cave for the last hundreds of millennia or so : one by one, each of these dozens of ground layers are now carefully excavated. This very long and continuous sequence of deposits make Scladina one of the reference centres for climate and flora in Northen Europe. Discoveries include many bones from Neanderthal skeletons, notably in 1993 the lower jaw of a young Neanderthal girl about 10 years old when she died, but also some teeth, biface stones etc. Remains from animals are the most common – cave bear teeth for example : some can still be seen in-situ. The tour lasts approximately 90 minutes. Some of the findings can be seen in nearby “Le Phare” museum in Andenne.

Just a few kilometres from Scladina, we arrived on time at Goyet caves for our second visit of the afternoon. These caves have been closed during the last years but are now open again. Pre-booking is required as well, although here again our group did not reach the maximum number of visitors. There is usually one Dutch and one French tour each day of opening. This visit was more a kind of (reasonable) underground “adventure trip”. Our guide invited us to follow him through narrow natural corridors, up and down in the cave, showing stalagmites and stalactites here and there. This was pleasant but very far from marvels from caves in Slovenia or in the South of France. The second part of the visit is the “pre-historical” part of the tour, ie the cave where Neanderthal remains were found – as early as 1868. Here again, nothing is left, excavations have ended, so the guide was just telling us about the findings from the past – including a much debated skull : is it from a young wolf or the first form of a dog? The ground layer it was found inside would make it the oldest dog in the world. It seems no definitive conclusion was reached yet… Until recently, it was possible to freely access the entrance of these caves from the outside (still, the opening of the caves are kept closed by grids), but the rocks above have been deemed unsafe, so this external path is now closed and the only possibility to enter the caves is through the man-dug entrance that is used for the guided tour, a few hundred meters further.

It is difficult to say if these caves should become a WHS. There is not much left from Neanderthal times here, but there is no “outstanding” place for this period of Prehistory somewhere else in the world either. The interest of these caves in Belgium is that some of the first remains from Neanderthal were found here and fuelled the Scientists discussions that led to the identification of this distinct human species. At the end of the day, our experience as visitors was very much the same as our visit to the ice caves in Germany a few years ago, and our pictures look alike. As for the inscription, we let it to the Experts to decide.

Els Slots

The Netherlands - 17-Jan-21 -

There are four fossil sites included in this TWHS: the Caves of Schmerling, Scladina, Goyet and Spy. They lie within a 50km circle around the city of Namur. Scladina can be visited with a guided tour on certain Sundays, Schmerling and Spy require a pilgrimage on foot and Goyet seems to be closed indefinitely. The Neanderthal remains and associated fossils of course have been whisked away to museums and universities long ago, but these sites are mostly about the Neanderthaler lifestyle and the development of Paleoanthropology as a science.

I choose Spy Cave for my visit. First I went to the museum about the findings in the nearby village. I was the only visitor, having easily secured a time-slot a day before by e-mail. The exhibition is in French but I received a folder with the texts in Dutch. You need those texts as the exhibition consists mostly of information panels. Spy Cave has brought us three Neanderthal specimen: a man, a woman and a small child. Their bones (discovered in 1886) were all mixed up and it took until 2010 to confirm there were three of them. The female had scars around her teeth which seems to indicate that she used toothpicks a lot! Unfortunately there are few findings on show – only some stone tools. Also there are copies of the bones of Spy I & II and an artist’s impression of how the Neanderthal man would have looked like. They must see a lot of school groups here. The most interesting part of the museum I found the 12 minute video at the end.

I then drove on for a few kilometers to the parking lot for the cave itself. The Grotte de Spy can be reached on foot via a side path of a fitness trail, it’s about 25 minutes walk in total. The trail is very muddy and the (signposted) path to the cave even more so. A number of hairpin turns take you down to the cave which lies just above the river Orneau. The path was so steep and slippery that I ended up taking a shortcut straight down the hill on my bum.

The cave itself is fully accessible and there seems to be no security in place. The only sign that betrays that this is not a normal cave is the memorial stone from 1928 that has been attached to its front. I entered the main ‘hall’ and two side rooms which seemed like perfect shelters. I learned from the museum that the Neanderthaler did not live in caves – they had camps, however most of those (except for 1 in Germany) did not withstand the test of time. Excavations at the site of Spy have brought forward animal bones (including those of mammoths) and stone tools in the same stratigraphic layer as the Neanderthal skeletons.

ICOMOS has carried out a thematic study on the somewhat broader subject of fossil hominid sites in 1997 and although evaluating no less than 31 sites, these Walloon ones are not among them. They were ranked on 6 criteria, including the number of the finds, the antiquity of those and the potential for further discoveries. The OUV of the Neanderthal fossil sites of Wallonia mostly lies in the role they played in the research of the history of the knowledge about the Neanderthal. Together with those in the German Neander Valley they convinced scientists in the late 19th century that these were the remains of a human ancestor. The first Neanderthal remains overall were discovered in 1829 by Philippe-Charles Schmerling in the Grottes d'Engis (now called the Caves of Schmerling, also part of this TWHS), but he thought it was an ancient skull of an anatomically modern human.

I do think that the Neanderthal history deserves a spot on the List, but there seems to be no singular site that really stands out. Of course we already have Gorham's Cave (wealth of  archaeological evidence), the Mount Carmel Caves (chronology of human evolution) and Le Moustier in the Vezere Valley (gave name to name a specific type of tools and artifacts, associated primarily with the Neanderthals in Europe, as Mousterian Industry). You’d need a number of sites to tell a coherent story; and with such a transnational serial site one or two of these Belgian locations could fit in together with for example Iraq's Shanidar Cave (full skeletons) and the Russian Denisova Cave (including a Neanderthal/Denisovan hybrid).

Read more from Els Slots here.

Jakob Frenzel

Germany - 02-May-19 -

July 2018 - we spent the night just 200metres from the entrance of Grotte de Goyet on our trip to France. We did take a walk through the little town, and even came by the entrance to this cave. However, it was not on the tentative list last year, so I would rather call it a near miss, than counting it to the visited sites.

But maybe it should be an extensions to the flint mines in Mons? I don't know. Anyway, we can recoomedn the campground nextby, its very calm and green.

Zoë Sheng

Chinese-Canadian - 30-Apr-19 -

I've been to at least 4 human fossil sites around the world and that's only world heritage so there are probably a half dozen more and now I can add Wallonia to the list. I went to the small museum in Spy, assuming that the Spy Cave (cool name for either a Jason Stratham action flick or a Clive Cussler book.

I did not visit the cave itself because I believe it is off-limits and all items found inside have been moved already.

The museum has weird opening hours: Wednesday to Sunday only 13:00-17:00. They don't get many visitors. There is also not much English available with most in French and Dutch only. Hardly makes the 5 Euros worth it. Besides, as I mentioned before the addition of yet another human evolution site feels overkill, then a study to include only the main sites is needed because they just keep coming.