With Björn Kurtén in Catalonia — a winter journey (1979)

I was one of Björn Kurtén's last students and came to spend much time with him during the years that we overlapped at the University of Helsinki, which I entered in 1973. Those were marvellous, unforgettable and deeply formative years, rich with science, art and people of all sorts (see Fortelius & Werdelin 2024). While recently sorting through my old papers I stumbled on a forgotten diary from 1979, which contains, among other things, the description of a journey in deep winter from Helsinki to Marseille and back. The main goal was the Ph.D. defence of Evelyne Crégut1 and a seminar to be held there at the same time. Björn was on the Ph.D. jury and had invited me to come along, at my own expense, of course. I think this was because he thought my experience of excavations at the Petralona Cave in Greece two years before might be of interest to the local scientists, whose research was focused on the Caune de l'Arago Cave in Tautavel, in French Catalonia. Both these caves had delivered fossil human cranial and postcranial remains, which at the time were among the oldest evidence for a human presence in Europe. I believe Björn travelled by air. I travelled separately by train, stopping at several points to see friends, researchers and collections; a holdover from my Interrail-and-hitch-hiker period a few years earlier. In the excerpt below I mainly describe events that occurred during an excursion to the Caune de l'Arago Cave and Prehistory Museum in Tautavel, the day after the defence and seminar (see Figs. 1–3). Despite some moments of transient chaos, it shows Björn as I remember him: kind, enthusiastic, open minded, determined, generous, sometimes rowdy — and with a wonderful sense of humour, even in moments of adversity. The text has been Google-translated from re-typed, handwritten diary notes in Swedish, with (only) the worst errors fixed manually; ‘/.../’ indicates omitted parts.