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Hello and

thanks for downloading Witness History from the BBC World Service. I'm Lucy Burns and today I'm taking you really far back into history to the time of the Neanderthals.

This is the story of the caves at Brunykel in southern France and a mysterious

structure built deep underground nearly 200,000 years ago. The cave system at Brunykel was discovered in 1990 after

teenage caver Bruno Kovulchevsky was exploring a rock face near his home and

found an interesting hole.

You could put your hand in it, no more than 20 centimeters height in between the rock and the ground,

and the day I've first it the cave was taking some air in and the day I went a second time by myself

the cave was blowing air out.

If there was air coming in and out of the hole,

that meant there could be a larger cave behind it.

Bruno started cycling up to the hole at weekends to investigate.

So I started to dig with very, very basic tools, a hammer, chisel, a wee diggy homemade tool, and basically had to dig a channel the size of my body.

He kept going back week after week, enlisting his family to help him dig and a couple of years later he had dug a passageway big enough to wiggle through once it'd taken off his bulky caving overalls.

So I kind of was just in detail. once it had taken off his bulky caving overalls.

So I kind of was just in t-shirt, my Andes and gumbots.

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