This Road Goes Straight Through A Major Prehistoric Cave

In the hills of southwest France, there is a road that goes directly through an enormous prehistoric cave. It is quite possibly the coolest 420m of road you will ever see. But wait until you find out what they discovered when they built it…

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Hello, bonjour, and bonjorn! It is a ridiculously nice November day, and I’ve decided to hire a bicycle, and head to a small village in 
the hills of southwest France. Because today, we are going to see quite possibly THE coolest 420m of road you have ever seen. Erm, just to be clear, this is not it yet. [TIM] Now, there is a sign just 
here that says, “allumez vos feux” which is the French way of saying 
“please switch your headlights on”. Although literally, that translates 
as “Light up your fires”. And there’s a very good reason 
they ask you to do that., because this road is about to do something… a little bit special! ♫ Music (and scenery): Prehistoric French Rock ♫ This is la Grotte du Mas d’Azil, the cave of Mas d’Azil, a prehistoric natural tunnel created many 
millions of moons ago by the river Arize (which you can just about 
see down to the right there). For most of its history, this was just 
your average enormous prehistoric cave, until the 1850s, when Napoleon III 
decided to stick a road right through it. Of course, he could have built a longer 
road going around or over the hill, but seeing that nature had already 
built him the perfect tunnel, he thought, why not use it? So he did! And as if a road casually going through a giant 
prehistoric cave wasn’t cool enough already, wait until you find out what they 
discovered when they built it. Because building this road required some 
pretty major earthwork and excavations and would anyone like to guess what happened 
when they started making major excavations in a giant prehistoric cave? They found what I can only 
describe as a prehistoric bonanza. We’re talking woolly mammoth bones, woolly rhinoceros bones, all sorts of other bones and fossils – and that’s just the Ice Age stuff; they also discovered hundreds of Stone 
Age tools, weapons, and painted pebbles, plus some lovely contemporary artwork including this incredible depiction of a horse and this incredible depiction of a horse. But perhaps the most mind-blowing discovery of all was one they didn’t even realise they had made. In 1859, the amateur archaeologist 
leading the study of the cave, a local priest called Jean-Jaques Pouech, published a report describing 
something that he’d found here, which he described as “eggshell 
fragments of very great dimensions… at least four times the volume of ostrich eggs.” Pouech assumed that the eggs must have come 
from some sort of giant long-extinct bird; what he never realised was he had just become 
the first person to discover dinosaur eggs. Or possibly the second person. I don’t know if you’ve ever tried to research 
“who was the first person to find dinosaur eggs?” but it seems historians all 
agree that the first two people were Jean Jacques Pouech and his 
fellow Frenchman Philippe Matheron; the problem is no-one seems to agree which 
one came first and which one came second. Anyway, the point is: this cave was the first or 
second place where dinosaur eggs were discovered. And if you want to see more of the caves here, there is a visitor centre offering guided tours, which are well worth doing if you actually 
want to see some bones and fossils. However, unfortunately the tours are not 
suitable for anyone with accessibility issues, and they don’t let you film 
the tour and put it on YouTube, so all I can show you is the gift shop. But hey, it feels kind of appropriate for me to leave a few things for you to discover if you ever come here yourself. And as for the road, it is a normal public road. Anyone can use it. All you need to do is turn up, and switch your headlights on! And if you’d like to visit the cave of Mas d’Azil, you’ll find it just to the south 
of the village of the same name about halfway between the city of Toulouse 
and the French border with Spain. And the easiest way to get 
here is definitely by car, but if you fancy a challenge, you could get a train to the town 
of Foix, hire a bicycle from there, and then cycle 30km along country roads and what looks suspiciously 
like a disused railway. So now you know why I did it that way. And as always thank you very much for watching, and I’ll see you soon.