4. Gravettian (or Perigordian) beginning 27,000 years ago.
5. Solutrean beginning 22,000 years ago.
6. Magdalenian beginning 17,000 years ago.
The dates are approximate, of course, and each era is subdivided into early and late periods.
These distinctions arose during the twentieth century as archaeologists struggled to date the art and artifacts they were finding in caves and in the remains of open-air encampments. The two giant figures in cave art from 1900 to 1980, Henri Breuil and Andre Leroi-Gourhan, spent much of their careers constructing dating systems based on the discernible styles of cave art and assigning art in the caves to one period or another. The assumption was that art that appeared crude was older and art that appeared refined was newer and art that appeared in between was in-between.
Even after 1950, when radiocarbon dating became possible, cave art remained difficult to date because the paints usually have a mineral base and radiocarbon dating works only on organic material. But caves discovered during the 1990s, especially Chauvet and Cosquer, contained refined art that could be dated by radiocarbon and, to everyone's surprise, turned out to be quite old. While some of the paintings in Chauvet are 32,000 years old, making them Aurignacian, an archaeologist dating by their appearance would have said they must be Magdalenian and thus only 17,000 years old.
These discoveries made archaeologists question the distinctions among the time-honored cultures. The old assumption that cave art demonstrated an evolution from crude to refined has been proved wrong and has disappeared entirely. Consequently, I don't refer to the art or the people who made it as Aurignacian, or Gravettian, or by any of the other technical names, useful as those distinctions are to a specialist. Instead, I give dates for the art when it is possible, and usually it is.
I use a variety of names for the people who made the art—Ice Age hunters, Paleolithic artists, the ancient people, and so on— and intend them to be interchangeable. In scientific writing the Stone Age is divided into the older Paleolithic and the newer Neolithic. The practice of painting in caves did not extend into the Neolithic. When I use the term Stone Age, I am referring only to the Paleolithic.
CHAPTER 1
The Seductive Axe;
The Well-Clothed Arrivals
F ont-de-Gaume is one of almost 350 known caves containing art from prehistoric times. The art in these caves is the creation of the first recorded civilization in history. It appeared sometime between 30,000 and 40,000 years ago and spread throughout Europe and Asia. As it moved across this great expanse, the civilization preserved a basic unity, aided by what must have been a surprisingly efficient network of communication and trade. Because of that network, goods that were considered precious during the Ice Age—obsidian or certain seashells, for example—turn up in archaeological sites hundreds of miles from their place of origin. Also, there was art everywhere in the form of statuettes or engravings on stone, ivory, or antlers.
Within this broad similarity, however, the culture evolved differently in different places, developing distinctive local customs, styles, and traditions among many widely scattered societies. The same might be said of Europe today, where each nation has evolved as a set of local variations on the same overarching culture. Painting in caves was one such local development. Except for a few widely scattered instances, the only people who painted in caves lived in what is now southern France and northern Spain. Of course, in places like the steppes of Russia there were no caves to paint. But elsewhere, in Germany for example, there were plenty of caves, yet the people who lived nearby apparently neither explored nor painted them. It was the people who lived among the caves on either side of the Pyrenees who developed this powerful and enduring means of expression.
The oldest cave paintings yet discovered are in a cave named Chauvet in southern France. They are about 32,000 years old. The paintings show huge, vivid herds of animals spilling across the walls. In particular there are lions and horses all painted with an individuality and a dynamism that make them masterpieces. The lions are on the hunt and look fierce and wild-eyed. But cave bears were just as ferocious as lions, yet there is a wonderful, roly-poly bear with his head bent low as if he were sniffing flowers on the ground. The paintings there have all the refinement, subtlety, and power that great art has had ever since.
Having burst at once into full flower at Chauvet, cave painting remained much the same until it died out about 10,000 years ago. The changes that did occur were subtle. Lions and bears appear frequently in the paintings at Chauvet but become rare in the caves painted thousands of years later. Perhaps the change shows that those predators had become less of a threat as humans learned how to control or exterminate them. Styles changed subtly, too. Chauvet and, say, Lascaux were painted by different artists who had different visions. But the subtle differences only underscore the essential similarity, no matter what era or what place. Horses, bison, human hands, reindeer, and various repeated and consistent geometric signs—these images appear again and again in cave after cave. Horses, for example, are common at Chauvet and appear throughout the cave. At Lascaux, which was created 15,000 years later, horses are the dominant animal in the cave and constitute over half of the one thousand or so paintings and engravings.
There is also a strict consistency for 20,000 years in what is not pictured. Fish are rare, even though multitudes of salmon spawned in the rivers. With one or two exceptions, there are no insects, even though thick clouds of flies must have followed the herds of reindeer. There are no rodents, which were also common, no reptiles, and no birds except for a few owls. Sometimes the owls are shown front and back, implying that they had a special status because they appeared to be able to turn their heads 360 degrees. Also, many species of mammals were excluded, beginning with bats and extending to many larger, common animals, such as hyenas. The cave painters were not creating a bestiary or a zoological catalog. Nor were they attempting to re-create and record the world they saw around them in complete detail. Nor do the species pictured in the caves appear at the whim of the artists. Instead these prehistoric geniuses chose to paint animals that had a special place in their culture. Their work portrays the animals that their culture valued, not so much in a practical way—or else there would have been more fish, which were an important part of their diet—but in an aesthetic or mythological or spiritual way. Somehow the whole universe depended on the animals in the paintings.
There were other strict conventions about things that are not shown. None of the thousands of animals is shown in a landscape. There is never a tree or a bush or a flower. Nor are there rivers, lakes, cliffs, rocks, or caves. Sometimes a natural ridge in the cave wall serves as a ground line; but, for the most part, whether the animals are running, standing still, rearing, fighting, or even falling, they all do so in empty space. There's no sky either—no stars, no moon, and no sun. That's a peculiar, puzzling omission, since prehistoric people surely observed the sky closely in order to mark time and anticipate the coming seasons and migrations of the animal herds.
It's also surprising that the caves are very chaste. There are pictures of vulvas, penises that are occasionally erect, pregnant women, and a variety of geometric shapes that suggest male or female genitals. But the animals are never actually mating and neither are the humans. (We call the first people to paint in the caves the Aurignacians. A frequently cited paper about them is titled “No Sex, Please—We're Aurignacians.”) One small, flat rock has an engraving of a man and woman having sex, but that is the only such representation ever found from these prehistoric times. Apparently it was the work of the ur-pornographer. Nor are there animals giving birth except for a peculiar carving on a spear thrower. Even fawns, cubs, or other young are extremely rare.
The colors are consistent as well. The cave painters did have a wide range of colors in their palette, but the two that dominated everywhere were black obtained from manganese dioxide or occasionally charcoal, and red, obtained from iron oxide. The colored minerals were pulver
ized and then mixed with some fluid to make the paint. Often the fluid was water from the cave itself. It contained dissolved minerals from that particular place, which made the paint bind to that cave ‘s walls more easily.
The artistic techniques remained identical during the many millennia that cave painting lasted. The artists chipped tiny, pointed chisels from flints to use as engravers. They sometimes used crayons of charcoal or paintbrushes made from animal hairs. More frequently they used wads of fur or perhaps moss and pressed them on the walls. Just as frequently they blew the paint onto the wall by using a hollow reed or bone pipe or by putting the paint in their mouths and spitting it on in a series of explosive puffs made with the lips. When blowing the paint, they used either their hands or a stencil of bark or hide in order to make the shape they desired.
This immutable similarity in themes, colors, and techniques shows that the cave paintings were the creation of artists working in a cultural tradition that survived for more than 20,000 years. For that tradition to have endured essentially unchanged for so long, it must have been passed from generation to generation in a precise, clear, and, most of all, memorable way, since this whole expanse of time was well before the invention of writing. And as painting is both an art and a skill that must be learned, and as there was a single acceptable style to which the painters had to conform, the skills of painting must have been taught.
This is a startling idea, since, with painting being taught, it is very likely that to preserve the culture other skills were taught as well. Knowledge and beliefs would have been transmitted to a new generation in a way that was more formal and rigorous than telling tales around a campfire. One skill that might have been taught was music. Several archaeological digs in Ice Age sites have turned up flutes and whistles made from hollowed bone. Some people are natural musicians, but for most people, learning to play an instrument requires instruction. And with music there must have been dancing, songs, and chanting, too. It would have been ritual or stylized dancing and it, too, would have been passed through the generations. The songs and chants would probably have had a definite rhythm as well as the repetitions and stock phrases that characterize oral poetry everywhere.
But because there was no writing, the music, dances, songs, and elaborate mythology from the first civilization are gone forever. The beautiful carvings of animals on bone, ivory, and stones and the paintings in the caves are really all that remain from this cultural tradition that was so fulfilling and profound that it lasted more than 20,000 years. For people in the Ice Age, this art was their religion, their history, and their science. It made the world comprehensible, gave order and meaning to their lives, and informed their sense of beauty.
• • •
The cave artists poured all their genius into pictures of animals. When they did paint or engrave pictures of people, they did so with little care or effort; most of such pictures are stylized stick figures or simple line drawings of crude faces that look like cartoons or caricatures. The beauty and convincing realism of so many of the animal paintings show that the artists were so skillful that they could easily have created realistic paintings of people if they had cared to. They could even have painted realistic portraits—and how fortunate we would be if they had.
But creating pictures of people evidently did not interest the cave artists very much. Some scholars propose that there was a religious or social prohibition against human images in art, as there is in Islamic countries today and other cultures as well, but that explanation has never satisfied me. If there had been such a prohibition, there wouldn't be any human images at all, not even crude caricatures. It's more likely, I believe, that those stick figures are realistic in their way. They, together with the paintings of animals, show what people thought of themselves in relation to the world around them, a world ordained for animals and not for people.
Far from being the dominant creatures on the planet as is true today, people were insignificant, hanging on as best they could at the edges of a world that belonged to animals, teeming swarms of animals. Apparently the earth belonged to the animals by right. They seemed to understand it and have power over it. And the power, privilege, and dominance of animals are exactly what the cave paintings show.
Today it is almost impossible for us to imagine what a vast profusion of animals there actually was. Every species native to Europe today was there, along with species that are now extinct. There were hedgehogs, shrews, and moles, as well as rats, mice, and other rodents. The rodents had many predators, including polecats of various kinds. There were minks, ermines, badgers, otters, wolves, jackals, foxes, and raccoons. Bats blackened the sky at evening, and there were numberless birds, including owls, partridge, grouse, and more exotic species. Seals lounged by the rivers, which during the spring spawn were thick with salmon.
Saber-toothed tigers were extinct in Europe by the time humans arrived, but plenty of ferocious cats still remained. Wildcats, larger than the ones today, and two varieties of lynx still roamed about, hunting rodents and rabbits. There were leopards that were peculiar-looking compared with the sleek cats of today. Like dachshunds, they had a small head, a long body, short legs, and an extremely long tail. And there were cheetahs, larger than today's version but just as fast. The most impressive cat was the cave lion. It was half again as big as lions today, although it did not have a mane. Cave lions also differed from most modern cats because they hunted in groups rather than alone. Their coordinated efforts were necessary because they hunted aurochs, bison, giant deer, elk, and other large game too formidable for a single attacker. The paintings in Chauvet show groups of lions on just such a hunt.
Modern humans began arriving at a time of global change, when the weather turned colder. Forests died out and were replaced by immense savannahs of open land, interrupted only by rivers and mountains. These grassy expanses were home to endless herds of reindeer and primitive horses, the two species that became the foundation of the humans’ diet. The herds, surrounded by clouds of buzzing flies, gnats, midges, and mosquitoes, followed their migratory routes across the landscape that they shared with an array of other bovines and ungulates— aurochs, red deer, bison, elk, and the magnificent megaloceros, now extinct, whose antlers were thick as palm fronds and spanned twelve feet.
In fact, most of the animals in the Ice Age were larger than their modern counterparts. There were three kinds of hyenas, including the terrifying short-faced hyena, which was as big as a lion. Wolverines lurking in the bogs were more dangerous than the packs of wolves. In order to attack a large animal, a wolverine would leap from a tree onto the back of its prey, dig in its claws to keep from being bucked off, and then rapidly chew through the victim's neck until its bones were severed.
Cave bears, although exclusively vegetarian, were so huge that they would dwarf a modern grizzly. They would have been perfectly capable of grabbing a grizzly's head in their jaws and crushing it. Their range was confined to Western and Central Europe and they didn't wander far from the territory where they were born. Humans must have been careful not to enter a cave while a bear was in it and didn't hunt them much either—cave bears were ferocious and difficult to kill, while horses and reindeer, which were far less dangerous and much more vulnerable, abounded.
Late in the fall the bears dug out large round cavities in cave floors, where they hibernated. The floor of Chauvet is pockmarked with these holes, and another cave, Rouffignac, has thousands upon thousands of them, some more than half a mile into the cave. Each of the cavities represents one year, since only one bear hibernated in a cave each season. The bears marked their path into the black depths of the cave with urine and with scratches on the walls. Then in spring they could find their path out through the darkness by scent. Occasionally they were injured or killed during hibernation by rocks falling from the cave ceiling. Fractures are common in their skeletons. In males even the penis bones are often broken, possibly as a result of fighting over females after awakening from hibernation. Cave bears
seldom lived more than twenty years, and their skeletons show rheumatism, arthritis, and other plagues that come with age. Most of them died during hibernation when either the inexperience of youth or the infirmities of disease or old age prevented them from building up enough fat during the rest of the year to survive their long sleep.
Among all the species that thrived and multiplied during this fecund era, the largest by far was the woolly mammoth. These animals, with their long, curved tusks, appear frequently on the walls of the painted caves and in engravings on bone and ivory. Restless, constantly foraging, they covered the entire northern hemisphere from Europe, across Asia, and into North America.
These lumbering giants weighed six tons yet had such delicate musculature at the end of their trunks that they could sort through different blades of grass to decide which ones to eat. They also had tender sensibilities and would aid and protect members of their herd who were sick, injured, or in danger. Eating only grass, branches, and bark, they had to graze as much as twenty hours in order to consume the four hundred pounds of food they needed each day. They were not mature until they were more than fifteen years old. Their gestation period was two years; calves were born one at a time; and a female would not get pregnant again until three or four years after giving birth. And yet the environment was lush enough to support their immense appetites, and, despite an agonizingly slow rate of reproduction, they multiplied into numbers that defy belief.
Several archaeological sites give indirect evidence of just how many mammoths there really were. On the Russian steppes about 15,000 years ago, people made huts from mammoth bones that were linked together intricately as jigsaw puzzles. Each hut needed twenty-five skulls for its foundation, as well as twenty pelvises. On top of them the builders arranged twelve more skulls, fifteen pelvises, and other bones. Hides were stretched across the top and held down by thirty-five tusks. Then came an outer wall with ninety-five interlocked lower jaws. A single hut could contain almost four hundred bones that in total weighed over twenty-three tons. A single settlement might have five such huts, each of them a testament to ingenuity and hard work.
The Cave Painters Page 2
