Emile Fradin, peasant-proprietor of the Glozel hoard, died on February 10th, aged 103

The Economist ^ | March 11th 2010 | unattributed

[SunkenCiv]

The finds were hugely intriguing. Visitors to Mr Fradin's museum, admission four francs, would find -- will still find -- masks and carvings of faces without mouths; bones pierced with holes, with the sun's rays scratched round them; ceramic pots, schist rings, polished stones. Some figures were hermaphrodite idols, with phalluses in their foreheads. Several bone carvings showed reindeer running, though reindeer were thought to have died out in that part of France 10,000 years earlier. But most exciting were the dozens of square clay tablets inscribed with letters which, if Neolithic, predated by many millennia the Phoenician characters from which Western alphabets were supposed to have come -- making Glozel, not the Middle East, the cradle of Western civilisation.

[SunkenCiv]

;’) I don’t think I can take that much France. ;’)

[colorado tanker]

Actually, I think France is one of the most pleasant places to pass time in the world. It’d be just about perfect - if the French didn’t live there.