page_title: Rock of Solutré
section_title: Hunting site
hierarchical_section_title: Rock of Solutré / Prehistory / Hunting site
caption_attribution_description: Français&#160;: La chasse au cheval à Solutré, d'après une illustration de "L'Homme primitif" de Louis Figuier, édition de 1876. Illustration complémentaire à la légende développée par Adrien Arcelin (Cranile).
context_page_description: The Rock of Solutré, is a limestone escarpment 8 km west of Mâcon, France, overlooking the commune of Solutré-Pouilly. It is an iconic site in the department of Saône-et-Loire, in Bourgogne-Franche-Comté. Protected by the French law on sites naturels classés and currently at the heart of a grand site national operation, it draws its fame severally as a rare geological phenomenon of the region, as a prehistoric site of the eponymous Solutrean paleolithic culture, and for the natural environment which its summit provides, the pelouse calciole grassland of Mâcon, with its distinctive flora and fauna. Occupied by man for at least 55,000 years, it is also the cradle of the Pouilly-Fuissé wine appellation. It has attracted media coverage since the 1980s when French President François Mitterrand started to make ritual ascents of the peak once per year.
context_section_description: The height of the sites in relation to the flood plain was the most important factor for human habitation. Providing shelter and food for migrant groups, the foot of the rock, strewn with debris, afforded hunters the opportunity to develop traps.
  The bone-laden magma can be explained by the fact that the site was used by four great paleolithic civilizations over the 25,000 years from 35,000 to 10,000 B.C, an extremely long time period.
  The use of this site was therefore devoted to hunting activity, butchering and smoking meat, while the neighbouring Rock of Vergisson was a site for habitation. The material found at Solutré was therefore linked with hunting; many tools were found including the flints cut in the shape of bay leaves which are characteristic of Solutrean culture.
  Contrary to the legend of the "hunt into the abyss", prehistoric man of Solutré region never hunted horses by driving them off the rock. This theory, which was never brought by Testot-Ferry, in his scientific publications, in fact appeared in Arcelin's prehistory-based novel, "Solutré" (Paris 1872); it has never been other than a fiction which caught the popular imagination. The incongruity of this hypothesis was easily shown from the distance between the bones and the summit of the rock, among other considerations.
  Another legend told that the dog's domestication was made in Solutré where wolves cooperated with  humans during "hunt into the abyss". This was also falsified in as the first domestic dog has been found in the Altai Mountains and dated 33,000 B.C.
caption: The Solutré horse hunt, from an illustration of "primitive man" by L. Figuier, 1876
exif: {}