Aurignac

A village of a few hundred people in the Pyrenean foothills gave its name to the first modern humans in Europe.

Human bones were found walled into a rock shelter at Aurignac, in Haute-Garonne, in 1852, and Edouard Lartet excavated the site in 1860. Henri Breuil applied the village's name to the wider tool industry in the early 1900s, in the course of a long argument among prehistorians about where it belonged in the sequence. The oldest known figurative sculpture and the oldest musical instruments are now classed as Aurignacian.