HOMO FABER. 2 MILLION YEARS OF HISTORY OF CUT STONE, FROM AFRICA TO THE GATES OF EUROPE Musée national de Préhistoire, Les Eyzies-de-Tayac From 9 July to 9 November 2021 Co-produced by the Rmn Grand Palais and the Musée National de Préhistoire des Eyzies-de- Tayac, a unique French museum specialising in Paleolithic Prehistory, this exhibition, which was created before 2019 and initially planned for the summer of 2020, finally opened to the public in July 2021 thanks to the tenacity of his curator Jean-Jacques Cleyet-Merle, former director of the Musée National de Préhistoire, and of scientific curators Jean-Philip Brugal, Ana Mgeladze and Pierre-Jean Texier. This exhibition immersed visitors in the astounding story of humanity, beginning with the very first stone-cutting techniques in the heart of Africa to African Homo erectus expansion

into Eurasia around 1.75 million years ago. Some of the oldest evidence of lithic industries practised by the first hominins, vestiges of ancient fauna found around Lake Turkana, and anthropological traces of the first evidence of the presence of hominins outside Africa, from the Dmanisi site in Georgia, were presented for the first time outside their original areas.

This ambitious project could not have come to fruition without the generous contribution of the Georgian National Museum in Tblisi and the National Museums of Kenya in Nairobi, which granted some exceptional loans.

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