Mature Flâneur
One Million Years on the French Riviera
We’ve been coming to the Côte d’Azur for a very long time.
People have been coming to the Côte d’Azur since before there were people. I had no idea. During our current swing through this sunny bit of paradise, where the edge of the Alps nudge against the Mediterranean Sea, we stumbled upon a paleontology museum in Menton located near the French/Italian border that showcases finds from several of prehistoric sites in the region. These include one of the oldest inhabited caves in all Europe, where Homo Erectus stayed about a million years ago.
As for me and Teresa (my beloved spouse and ever-curious co-flâneur), we find this coast beautiful, but too crowded and built up for our taste. We get it now: it’s always been popular. Apparently as soon as our hominid ancestors could walk upright (the meaning of erectus), they headed from Africa straight for the Riviera. While that’s probably an exaggeration, the evidence of the presence of our ancestors here, over such a long time horizon, blew my mind.
While most of the paleolithic finds were not actually on display at the museum…
