La Roche-Cotard Cave

Two kilometres north of Langeais, tucked into the limestone cliffs above the Loire, the cave of La Roche-Cotard is the least-visited remarkable place in Touraine. Most Loire Valley visitors walk straight past — which is understandable, because there is no castle here, no manicured garden, and no clear sign telling you to stop.

What the cave contains is an object that has rewritten — or at least complicated — the history of human cognition. The Mask of La Roche-Cotard is a Mousterian protofigurine: a lump of flint in which a small bone fragment has been deliberately inserted through a natural perforation, producing something that resembles a face. It was made around 75,000 years ago, not by Homo sapiens but by Neanderthals. The original artifact is in the museum at Tours, but the cave itself and its clifftop setting are accessible and worth the detour.

The walk up to the cave follows a path through vines and tufa, past cave dwellings still used as wine cellars. The view over the Loire from above the cliff is one of the quieter, less-photographed panoramas on this stretch of the river.

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A story
In 1975 a researcher noticed that a flint flake from the cave, about 10cm across, had a rounded bone fragment wedged through a natural hole in it — creating something that looks unmistakably like a face. The object, now known as the Mask of La Roche-Cotard, was carved by Neanderthals roughly 75,000 years ago, making it one of the oldest known attempts by any human species to represent a face. Whether Neanderthals were making art remains debated; this object refuses to let the question rest.