A revolutionary discovery...
The story begins not far from Aurignac in 1852. Jean-Baptiste Bonnemaison removes bones from a rabbit hole. Digging further, he discovered the entrance to a rock shelter, containing a collective burial and remains of extinct animals.
In 1860, the famous paleontologist Edouard Lartet discovered there, scattered in the ashes of a hearth, tools made of cut flint and reindeer antler; the reliefs of the meals of a group installed around the fire and fragments of cave bears, mammoths, cave hyenas, woolly rhinoceroses... Edouard Lartet thinks that a funeral meal was organized at each burial.
This major discovery definitively proves the existence of prehistoric humans, beyond the few millennia described in the Bible. In 1906, after an ardent scientific debate, Aurignac gave his name, becoming the eponym of the Aurignacian.
The site's notoriety grew, particularly during the Universal Exhibition of 1867 where Lartet gave Aurignac a place of honor by presenting the material discovered during the excavation.
In 1913, the Aurignac site became the eponymous Aurignacian site. The objects discovered there characterize the first material culture of modern man in the Upper Paleolithic chronology, between 38,000 and 28,000 years before the present.
The Aurignacian museum opened in 1969 but since 2014 has benefited from a new building, bright and accessible to all audiences. You will discover the impressive glacial fauna, the means of survival of these prehistoric people, thanks to objects from Aurignac but also from other renowned Aurignacian sites. Maps, timelines, facsimiles of distant pieces, drawings and videos shed light on this mysterious past.
