Solutré horse

This discovery gave rise to a popular legend about hunting in the abyss, according to which Paleolithic hunters guided herds of wild horses up the rock to precipitate them into the void and kill them.

The Paleolithic deposits near the Rock of Solutré, in Solutré-Pouilly, yielded a large number of horse remains, discovered by Adrien Arcelin and Henry Testot-Ferry in 1866.

[1] These bones were studied in 1874 by Professor Toussaint, in his Traité sur le cheval dans la station préhistorique de Solutré.

[11] According to the most recent theory, horses probably often passed close to the rock of Solutré during their seasonal migrations, overwintering in the Rhône and Saône valleys before moving westwards onto plateaus as the warm weather returned.

[17][18] Studies carried out by François Prat and then Jean-Luc Guadelli around 1989 showed that another, smaller, potential subspecies was present in the Magdalenian levels at Solutré.

[5][16] The discovery of the bones at Solutré gave rise to a legend relayed by popular culture,[19] according to which Paleolithic hunters guided herds of horses to the summit of the Roche, then threw them off the cliffs to kill them.

[20] Illustrated with a wealth of iconography,[21] it has been repeated dozens of times by authors, film-makers and artists, despite its impossibility, proven as early as the 1960s by the lay of the land.

[22] It is now widely disputed, not least because of the distance separating the cliffs of La Roche from the archaeological bone piles, of the order of a hundred meters.

[23] According to François Poplin, this legend would have endured through the symbolic association between horse and elevation to higher ground,[24] with a possible influence from the image of Panurge's sheep.