The Beginnings of this Blog and of Humanity.
Whenever asked, the first landmarks which certainly come to our minds when we think about France certainly are the Tour Eiffel, Nôtre-Dame de Paris, Versailles, the Louvre Museum, Mont Saint-Michel. These monuments and places are undeniably fascinating, iconic, beautiful, nothing to say about that, but they all come from the modern era or the Middle Ages, suggesting that rise of civilization in France occured around the time when Vercingetorix and his Gauls battled Caesar and his Romans. As most of you will surely know, though, reality is well different, witnessed by the numerous prehistoric decorated caves we can find in Southern France and Northern Spain, the oldest ones in Europe and among the oldest ones in the entire world. However, today I will not talk about these caves (but I will, soon) as I do not have to go that far back in history to tell you about this magnificent, criminally unknown place I discovered only a few months ago.
There in the distance, on the other side of this shore, you can see the silhouette of a prehistoric site. Can you recognise it at a first glance? I mean, that is no Stonehenge, no Jericho, no Giza. So, if you are wondering why this unrecognisable place has made the very first topic of my new blog, you'd better find yourself a seat, because I assure you will need it.
Believe it or not, but that is the oldest building in the world.
Before continuing our discussion about this ancient place, we shall outline the official definition of "building". Let's start by saying that this is not, by any means, the oldest building ever built by Man. That honour, in fact, belongs to Turkey, with its famous Göbekli Tepe, but that and all of the other, few, older site than the above pictured one are considered either as monuments or as simple structures (I am thinking about dolmens, for instance). So, what makes a structure a "building"? By definition, a building must have a recognisable shape, with walls higher than 1,5 metres for most of its perimeter and it must have an enclosed area with at least one entry.
Now that I explained everything I can reveal the name of the main character of this post. This is Barnenez, a cairn (a stone construction) situated near Plouezoc'h, a small village of nearly 1.200 inhabitants in Brittany, France. The radiocarbon dating told us that this monumental site was built around 4.850 B.C., meaning that yes, it predates by age Greek temples, Egyptian pyramids and Mesopotamian ziggurats. With its eleven chambers, Barnenez perfectly qualifies as a building, although its actual purpose remains a mystery. Many scholars, though, think that, instead of being a mere burial site, Barnenez was a spiritual place, a sort of gateway between our world and the afterworld where people would gather in order to communicate with their dearly departed ones. This theory would also be validated by the fact that the chambers are different from each others, suggesting that each one of them had a different purpose.
Whatever the reason it was built for was, the cairn of Barnenez is a fascinating testament of our past as human beings and, specifically for this blog, how ancient and vast "French" heritage actually is.
And this is only the beginning of our journey into this astonishing nation.
