There is no fire at the lake, but if you ever go to the Bugue Museum of Mineralogy and Paleontology, you will no doubt come across Hervé Franville-Lafargue, President of the “Le Bugue Minéral” association in the heat of the moment. I’d put my hand to… Well, in short, prehistoric man domesticated fire.
In France, the Cap Blanc-Nez deposit, in the Pas-de-Calais, offers beautiful finds of marcasite, a mineral known from the Upper Palaeolithic (about 45,000 to 12,000 years before the Present). It was used to produce fire by percussion.
In the Dordogne, they are found in the fields, in the form of iron nodules (kind of petanque balls) 7 to 8 cm thick. The exterior is very ugly but the interior is pretty! The key is to have a hammer on hand to break the creature in half… The little trick to preserve the beauty of your marcasite cut in half? Hairspray, to preserve it from oxygen oxidation. It’s not very prehistoric, as a product, but also to make fire, I bet you’ll use a lighter instead…