In 1878 he travelled to France for Paris’s third World Fair, a far grander show than the two previous. While in the Anthropological Sciences pavilion he noticed a display of prehistoric tools. Falling into conversation with researchers and scientists, he learned that they had come from caves in France. It inspired him to take another look at the Cantabrian offerings. The following year he retraced his steps to Altamira and began digging about, close by the original entrance, where he uncovered tools and spears along with shells and bones. He knew he was on to something and returned regularly. On one of these visits he was accompanied by his eight-year-old daughter, Maria. As the story goes, Maria looked towards the ceiling, oil lamp in hand, and noticed the artwork. Her reported response has become a cute, over-quoted line. Still, it is history. ‘Look, Daddy, at the oxen!’
In fact, the figures the girl was pointing to, and which her father had to crouch low to see because the paintings had been achieved in one of the shallowest chambers, represented not oxen but a herd of prehistoric bison. The upshot of this remarkable father-and-daughter outing was that the following year Don Marcelino published a booklet recounting his explorations and findings in these caves, as well as others in the area, in which he claimed that these drawings were from the Upper Palaeolithic period – in other words 14,000 years old, and therefore the earliest human artwork to have been unearthed anywhere.
And guess what?
The scientific community of the day rejected the findings, ridiculing Don Marcelino internationally, claiming that prehistoric man was not capable of such exquisite artistry, or on such a scale. The Church, keen to discredit an ancient treasury of such sophistication for fear it threatened the omnipotence of God and put the question of evolution uncomfortably into the spotlight, became involved. The cave paintings were proclaimed forgeries. Don Marcelino died in 1888, before his conclusions and the brilliance of his investigative work was acknowledged. Not until 1902 did scientists, in particular Emile Cartailhac, an eminent French prehistorian, whose voice had been one of the most vociferous denouncers of Marcelino, publicly admit that an injustice had been perpetrated and that the world of science needed to rectify that error. Altamira was genuine. Even more mind-blowing, later excavations revealed the existence of two periods of human occupation. The first was somewhere in the region of 18,500 years ago while the second was between 15,500 and 14,000 years ago.
More than twice the age of the olive trees in Bechealeh.
My walk from the manicured town led me to its outskirts before I began to ascend a gentle incline that curved and then hugged the lip of a forested elevation. With the pine-tree vegetation and the chalet-style houses, I could have believed I was in Switzerland or southern Germany. I tried to find somewhere for coffee, having quit the hotel before breakfast, but everywhere was closed. I passed local people engaged in neighbourly conversations at the roadsides, but nothing open. It was off season. The few folk who were about remarked on my passage with stares or indifference.
The road had straightened out. I knew I was on the right track and fast approaching the museum and caves when I spied a tourist bus stationed within a secured parking lot ahead to the left. It was only five to eleven. I paused, gazing down into the valley. I was ahead of my schedule. I caught the distant barking of dogs, a rook’s screech echoing in the morning’s stillness. Echoing. Echoes, in time and space. I stared at cattle grazing long-range, tiny as miniature toys down in the flat lowerlands. Altamira is Spanish for ‘high view’ and the caves are situated at 156 metres above present sea level. I was a long way from the Mediterranean. I had made a detour that seemed to be taking me drastically off course. The vegetation here was alpine rather than meridional. Traces of olive trees were slender possibilities. But I was hoping that from here my story would flip backwards in time to a beginning that was earlier than the magnificent groves of Bechealeh.
In Anatolia, in central Turkey, at Çatal Hüyük, I had tracked down what are thought by scientists to be clues to the earliest examples of fruit pressing, of almond and cherry farming. Those communities had settled, had created a fixed, organised society. They, too, had painted in their huts. They had travelled distances for berries and fruits, they had traded with distant neighbours. But they were an agricultural civilisation. Here, at Altamira, existed flourishing hunter communities.
I was beginning to think that the discovery of olive pressing was way older than I had imagined. The olive had been my link, my connecting point, to the countries that circle the shores of a sea, an inner sea, but in stitching those links together what was emerging was the birth of the Mediterranean landscape itself, its botanical journey, too. I had wanted to discover the historical roots of the olive to understand the evolution of the gnarled and twisted shapes begetting fruits on our farm. I wanted to get to grips with its chemical make-up, genetically, atavistically, narratively. I believed, still do, that we are destroying the planet we inhabit. We have set ourselves apart from nature. We continue to perceive ourselves in a relationship that is about ‘Earth’ and ‘Us’. And because of it, we are endangering all flora and fauna. While we were still struggling to stand upright, walk on two feet not four, plants were learning to convert sunlight into food. They were sophisticating organic chemistry and, through their own processes of survival, learning to work with water and the seasons. I hoped that somewhere within all these pasts lay a path forward.
As I gazed across at those grazed lowlands, at a Constable-like landscape not too dissimilar from the images of my childhood in the Kentish or Irish countrysides, hay and carts, and bovines feeding, many deciduous trees rather than the languorous palms and silver-leafed olives of my new existence, I understood I had shifted my point of seeking. My quest was the source, but it was also the future. I wanted intimacy with the Mediterranean shores, to know its past, to learn from its history, hoping for pointers to a future that I could not yet see.
I turned and stepped into the parking lot, moving towards the caves, light of foot.
Foolishly, I had not understood that the original caves had been permanently closed to the general public. No material I had read in advance had warned me of this.
During the 1960s and 1970s the paintings were becoming damaged by the damp breath, exhalations of carbon dioxide, of the crowds flocking to see the rupestral art. So, in 1977, it was decided to close the caves. In 1982 they were reopened but with very limited access, which explained the exceptionally long waiting list. The replica cave was opened in 2001, at which point the originals were closed entirely, so as to be able to protect and study them. The neo-caves, I was assured, were a faithful reproduction of the original: even the colour pigments for the artwork had been fashioned from the same powders. Every bump and incline, every rockface, nuance and contour had been represented down to its minutest detail. The ticket I had purchased offered me access to the neo-caves as well as the remarkable museum. At first, I was extremely disappointed. I had not travelled such an incredible distance to look at copies. But to walk away would have been ludicrous. The next tour was due to begin shortly, at eleven thirty. It was the one I had booked.
Picasso, who from his earliest years in Paris had been attracted to and challenged by primitive art, visited these caves, the originals, of course. Famously his conclusion was ‘Beyond Altamira, all is decadence’.
The drawings, polychromes of red, charcoal and ochre, reduced me to tears. I was not alone. In the laterally spacious, numinous chamber where the height at certain points reached no more than one and a half metres, we marvelled at how the ceiling decorations had been achieved – did these ‘primitive’ people lie on their backs while drawing? Altamira has frequently been described as ‘The Sistine Chapel of Prehistoric Art’. No wonder. I and the others in the party – we were ten ordinary individuals – stood or crouched in awe, most of us dewy-eyed. I noticed tears rolling down the cheeks of a heavily-lined middle-aged Italian; a Korean couple squatted, holding hands, staring at the ceiling, frozen in disbelief. Beholding these de
pictions of animals: a pregnant bison, herds running freely, using the textures and surfaces within the caves to bring creatures’ body parts and movements to life; horses painted over, palimpsests for other horses, red deer, wild boar; all with a breathtaking sense of dynamism, of flight …
Might these paintings have been representations by early hunters of what they had witnessed: the thunderous power of a herd on the run or the perfect stillness and grace of a beast grazing, watering, oblivious to man the stalker, watching, tracking? Or might these drawings, many with explicit sexual details, have been achieved by the women while their men were away hunting with spears and fishing hooks? Mothers and children at home base while the men were hunting, gathering … I even asked myself whether these interior spaces might not have been the earliest of classrooms. And what fuel did these ancestors use to illuminate these nocturnal, inner chambers? Did they work exclusively by firelight? ‘Far inside the darkness, barely lit by an oil lamp made of stone, with lichen for a wick…’ So was it the fat from game they used to fuel these primitive lamps or might there have been a vegetable oil? A pressed fruit?
Without exaggeration, I was seeing the world anew. Or for the first time, discovering it before Original Sin. And, of course, this was accurate. These works had been completed, sealed away and long buried before the scribes of the Bible had gone to work, before the parables of our Creation had been narrated. Many experts of today claim that these caves were a religious centre, that rites and marriages took place within them. I do not know. I do not want to overlay our theistic theories and belief systems on to the free spirit of the artists of these works whose repositories of stories were right in front of me, on the walls and ceilings. I wanted only to cherish what I was seeing. Purity. It was exactly what I had been hunting for in my search for that first arm that reached up into a tree and picked off a ripe olive from a silvery branch, then tasted it or squeezed it between fingers, rolling it to and fro and crushing it. The pleasure, the amazement, when the realisation dawned that there was a viscosy liquid inside the pulp, a gift from nature that could be utilised.
After the guided tour, I hung about in the museum for another three or more hours.
In the caves, on walls and ceiling, were handprints and the outlines of hands. The hands were rather small, not much bigger than the average modern adolescent’s. The outline had been painted by someone pressing his palm, fingers outstretched, against the cave’s surface while he or another traced its outline. Or so I had assumed; but not at all. Consider this: the hollow bones of birds, of such fragility, resembling tiny straws, had been loaded with a red pigment and then blown through, aiming the powder at the hand, delicately tracing its shape and staining the cave with the image. It was ingenious. Why hands and not feet, I asked myself? The catacomb was so shallow that the painters could, with almost equal facility, have lain on their backs and pressed their feet against the walls. Was it because hands talked, hands painted, hands cooked, hands made love?
Feet were the source of motion. They ran and tracked, while whole bodies hunted.
Cuts of hunted and slaughtered meat were cooked as steaks on their open fires and seasoned with herbs gathered hereabouts. Early steps towards a Mediterranean cuisine. A choice of tastes: with seasoning or without? A prelude to a more sophisticated kitchen. And then I found a note telling the visitor that the wild olive was in existence in prehistoric times and had grown along the Rift Valley. Yes! Syria, Lebanon, the Beqaa Valley, the sweep of land where I had found the oldest trees and the earliest traces of olive pressing, represented the most northerly point of the extensive Rift. There was no further information on the wild olives, nothing to say that the trees grew here around Altamira, nothing at that point to shift my thinking from the Middle East as the earliest source of olive farming, unless the trees were growing further south, all the way down to Ethiopia or Kenya, but I had no knowledge of this.
When I eventually left, instead of heading back to the town I walked to where the original caves were situated. On my way I bumped into the guide who had escorted us through la cueva nueva, the new cave. I asked him whether I could take a peek from the outside.
‘Sí, sí, no problema.’ He pointed in the direction, a matter of fifty metres from the reconstructed complex.
I thanked him, but, as I drew close, a guard appeared from out of a wooden hut and shooed me away, shouting angrily.
‘Just a quick look from the outside?’ I called.
A small yapping dog appeared at his feet. Iron gates reminiscent of an antiquated prison barred the entrance. He gesticulated agitatedly so I smiled, thanked him, paused briefly to make a swift mental note of the view down across the valley as it might have looked from within the shelter of the caves, and then I strode away in the direction of Santillana del Mar, Picasso’s words playing in my mind: ‘Beyond Altamira, all is decadence.’
What small creatures kept company with the Stone Age communities, living, nesting in crevices within the cave shelters? Were there brooding bats, birds singing, small mammals to feed? Were there nesting wasps or feral bees? I was fascinated by the hunters’ relationship with their surrounding nature. The artwork in the inner sanctum showed no trees, no heavens, no water. It was clear from all that was on display within the museum that these early men were skilled if primitive masters of stone and bone. Extraordinarily refined artwork on the shoulder blade of a large mammal; delicate work on smaller bones. As far as we know, they invented the catapult and fish hooks; they learned to tailor clothing and footwear from the skins of the animals they had slaughtered for meat. The wide vestibule must have been their hearth, where they would have congregated, gazing out at the rain or snow, deciding upon fishing trips or mollusc hunting down at the beach when the weather was clement. Did they swim in the sea? Did they make music? Recount stories, play and act together?
Before agriculturalists, this was an epoch when all land was each man’s public common. As far as we know, nothing was staked out by individual tribes. What was their relationship to the plant life, to the vast open spaces and forests? Running beneath canopies of tall trees, the sky masked, feet pounding on earth, what did they make of the undergrowth, its wildernesses and fruits? They had herbs for seasoning. These communities must have expressed interest in trees, in berries … and their earth was untainted by chemicals.
During my descent, a pair of caged mynah birds was screeching a hell of a racket, dogs barked incessantly, someone was vigorously chopping wood. Variations on original melodies.
From the entrance to the cave, the view had looked out upon a wide plain dotted with homesteads and grazing livestock. Due to the extremity of their climatic conditions, the vegetation the Palaeolithic people lived among would not have been identical to ours, but the pictorial composition from their limestone rock shelter would not have been entirely different. Today, sheep are grazing – sheep had not existed then – and stone and wooden houses are part of the picture. They had looked upon dense forested areas, holm oak forests, a northern variety of the native Mediterranean species, where an assortment of animals ranged, herds of wild beasts roamed at leisure, roaring, bellowing, screeching. Vast areas of those forests have long been cleared. Originally, the wood would have been chopped to build fires. Like the olive, holm oak burns slowly. Later, its hard wood would have been ideal for tools and carts, even wine vats, until eventually much of the forestland was cleared to construct more sophisticated habitations and to lay out fields for crops and the domestication and husbandry of stock.
Our climate today is less harsh, but is it conceivable that a sub-species of wild olive survived this close to the Atlantic? Holm oak and olives frequently coexist round the Mediterranean basin, both are natives to the region, and, because of their similar low pendulous branches, can be mistaken one for the other. The uncultivated olive tree, Olea sylvestris, was already known in prehistoric times in the Middle East, but might a distant cousin have grown here alongside evergreen oaks, offering shade, raincover to the tribal pe
oples of Altamira? The olive fares best in calcareous soils, limestone lowlands and coastal plains. This area offers all the requirements.
Beyond the caves I was on a high. I spent one more night in Santillana del Mar. I strolled about, in and out of the plazas, the narrow lanes of shops decorated with bric-a-brac hanging from walls and edifices and I took photographs. Rather too much religious iconography for my taste; the town had been a religious centre in the Middle Ages. Still, the stonework was attractive as was the medieval architecture and I was particularly taken with a life-sized stone sculpture of a bison in the central square. But I was not sorry to leave. If I could have returned to the caves … but I had no reservation.
I set off before dawn the next morning in a taxi chauffeured by a warm, extrovert woman who smoked and talked incessantly. It was five o’clock; how had she the stomach for it? To the bus station in Torrelavega where the early coach to Madrid was delayed. Not the drunken driver from Barcelona? No, it was another; a different company; a new direction altogether.
A gentle, waltzing descent southwards.
CENTRAL SPAIN
We waited in the cold, dark station for over an hour. Once the coach had arrived and we got under way, the scenery was, at times, quite spectacular. Travelling east, doubling back towards Santander before looping inland, the landscape was dotted with lone chalets or hamlets where the church bell towers had curved silhouettes that reminded me of human shadows. Once, there had been vast oak forests in these parts. Long since felled. Large tracts of pine had been planted on the lower hills, forestry land possibly. Again, I had the impression that I was in northern Europe, not Spain, not a country bordering the Mediterranean. I was missing the Med with its evocative scents and colours, glad to be on my way, though the vegetation around me was rich and green. Sightings of a few holm oaks interspersed with eucalypts and deciduous trees. Rolling fields, arable farmland. On the lower hills along the route south of Santander the ground was flecked with pockets of snow. Had there been bees in this vicinity during the two periods of occupation at Altamira? I had not seen any evidence at the museum. Too cold, perhaps, for them to survive. Apis mellifera had not been hybridised back then. Set back from the road were many stone farmhouses crumbling into ruins. Passing brooks, streams, fed by snow, burbling fast and troubled. Geese, ducks, turkeys padded about in fenced gardens the size of small allotments. Each with its own well-stocked, neatly amassed log pile. Smoke snaked skywards above the chimney stacks. Settling my bill at dawn, I was watched over by a fat, dozing dog, grumpy at having been disturbed. While waiting for the taxi, the receptionist, who had climbed out of bed across town to see me on my way, mentioned that the inhabitants hereabouts cherished their countryside and mistrusted the influx of overseas occupants, mass construction and commercialism. They feared the Benidormisation of the Pyrenees. I realised then that I had not seen a single estate agent’s offices in the town. Benidormisation.
The Olive Tree (The Olive Series Book 2) Page 6
