My European Family

by Karin Bojs

  Like so many other Ice Age dwelling places, Laugerie Haute is just a few metres away from a river. The people who stayed here enjoyed evening sunshine and a waterside view – as in the most desirable residences on the books of a modern estate agent.

  One can try to imagine how the people of the Solutrean felt when they gathered here in the depths of the Ice Age. I fancy it must have been a pleasure to come here. The various small groups probably lived in isolation for much of the year, hemmed in by the bitter cold. At Laugerie Haute they could meet other people, celebrate and hold ceremonies. The young had an opportunity to meet a partner, people could sit by the fireside sharing experiences and everyone had enough to eat.

  Their diet consisted chiefly of meat and bone marrow from reindeer. The numbers of other prey, such as horses, fell dramatically in the region when the cold was most severe. Ice Age people did eat plants, as evidenced by microscopic traces on their teeth. But the growing season was short, especially during the cold Solutrean.

  With all due respect to excavations and stone tools, it is the cave paintings that are the main draw for the hundreds of thousands of tourists who visit Les Eyzies every year. I, too, set off on an art tour of the region’s caves.

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  Laugerie Haute feels like visiting the remains of a huge party venue where my forebears used to hold their biggest celebrations. The Cap Blanc rock shelter (Abri du Cap Blanc), which lies about six kilometres (3¾ miles) east of Les Eyzies, has a more intimate feel to it. Coming here is more like visiting an individual family and admiring their interior decor.

  Just six of us have gathered together here at the small museum, with our pre-booked entrance tickets. There is no room for any more visitors. We will be allowed in to look at the site for a few minutes. Having checked carefully that none of us have smuggled a camera in, the guide unlocks a heavy iron door.

  Archaeologists have argued about when the friezes running along the rock walls were actually created; nowadays they are assigned to the Solutrean period. They are unusually well-preserved examples of how Ice Age people decorated the places where they lived from day to day. At most other sites, the rock walls that once bore these decorations have been eroded away.

  The Cap Blanc friezes are reliefs chiselled directly into the rock wall, forming a long parade of horses and bison. Oddly enough, these animals were not particularly common in people’s diet. That can be seen from the animal bones that archaeologists have discovered at the site. Almost 95 per cent of them come from reindeer, which were people’s most common prey during the coldest periods. Horses and bison clearly had great emotional significance. The artists of the Ice Age often chose to depict quite different animals from those they hunted day to day.

  From the homelike setting of Cap Blanc, I make my way down the valley to Font-de-Gaume. I am about to experience something entirely different that, far from reflecting everyday life, verges on the spiritual. This is art of the most exclusive kind, hidden deep within a cave. The Ice Age artists who created these images must have been the Rembrandts and Leonardos of their time.

  I go in with a French-speaking group of 10. Just a few steps into the mountainside all sensory impressions from the outside world cease. The light of the sun is extinguished. There is no birdsong, no breeze to be heard now. My skin registers only cold and damp. A low humming sound arises in my head, as my hearing tries to compensate for the silence within the mountain. I blink as my eyes attempt to adjust to the dark.

  Although the passageways in Font-de-Gaume are narrow, at least we modern visitors can walk upright, as the floor has been lowered for the sake of our comfort. Moreover, we have electric torches, which the guide carefully switches off as soon as we leave each section of the cave. He is anxious to protect the pictures as much as possible, both from electric light and against the acid produced by visitors’ breath.

  The Ice Age artists were obliged to crawl through certain sections. But those who painted the images in this cave had access to an important new invention – lamps. That meant they were no longer restricted to using simple wooden torches, as previous generations had been. The artists in Font-de-Gaume lit their way using stone lamps with small hollows, in which they burned animal fat and wicks made of vegetable matter.

  Font-de-Gaume, located on the periphery of Les Eyzies, was in use some 17,000 years ago, at the time of the Magdalenian culture. A continuation of the Solutrean culture, the Magdalenian was an undramatic transitional phase. While tools became slightly more sophisticated, the people seem to have been essentially the same. The cold of the Ice Age was gradually beginning to loosen its harshest grip, and the climate was becoming slightly milder.

  The artists of Font-de-Gaume painted their pictures with mixed pigments: yellow, red, brown, black and many intermediate shades. They produced these colours from reddish iron oxides and black manganese oxide from the mountains nearby. Sometimes they would burn stones to create particular colours. The artists ground the pigments in mortars and mixed colours on palettes, just like their modern counterparts. They applied the paint to the cave walls in many different ways, using their fingers, sticks, brushes made of animal hair, or feathers. They also blew powdered pigment directly onto a damp surface, just like the fresco painters of the Renaissance.

  Bison, with over 80 individual animals depicted, are the most frequent motif at Font-de-Gaume. Each is painted in such a way as to reveal its individual characteristics. The artists knew the sex of the animal they were painting, its age, the season and the situation in which the animal found itself. With skill and foresight, they exploited the shapes of the rock wall to achieve three-dimensional effects. In one of the chambers, some of the paintings are five metres (16½ feet) above the floor of the cave. To reach that high, the artists must have stood on each others’ shoulders.

  Polychrome paintings can be found in only a few Ice Age caves. The best known are at Altamira (Spain); Lascaux, near Les Eyzies; and Chauvet, in the mountains west of Lyon. The public is no longer allowed into these three caves at all. The only option is to look at copies.

  At the time of writing, members of the public can still enter Font-de-Gaume and view the original polychrome cave paintings, provided that they queue up on the spot and buy tickets the same morning. Whether Font-de-Gaume should also be closed, to protect the paintings against the depredations of lighting and visitors’ breath, is under discussion.

  I am grateful that I came in time to wander around in the cool, damp darkness and see bison, mammoths and horses appearing in the dim light, a little worn after all these thousands of years, but still so skilfully executed that they almost come alive.

  The pictures from a few thousand years later are simpler, still skilfully executed, but more stylised. In the cave at Les Combarelles, a few kilometres away from Font-de-Gaume, horses predominate. There are drawings of cave lions, cave bears and mammoths as well, but horses are the most common motif. In some cases, their shapes are simply incised into the rock wall, in others they are filled in with black pigment made from manganese oxide.

  The guide who escorts a French family and me through the long, narrow passageways believes that Les Combarelles was used by a clan whose totem animal was the horse. They returned to the same cave again and again over a few thousand years and drew hundreds of pictures. This was a way for the clan’s shaman to gather spiritual powers, or so he believes.

  To reach the cave at Rouffignac, I have to hire a car and drive about half an hour from Les Eyzies through a landscape of hillsides covered in deciduous woods and vineyards. The pictures here also date back to the Magdalenian and are approximately 15,000 years old. They recall the incised, monochrome horses at Les Combarelles.

  But it is images of mammoths that predominate at Rouffignac. There are over 150 of them. The first one meets you right at the entrance – a cheerful, rotund little woolly mammoth drawn only about a metre (3¼ feet) above ground level. It might well have been drawn specially for children. Further into the cave you can also see
bison, horses, mountain goats, woolly rhinoceroses and a cave bear. At an inaccessible spot, far down in a hollow, there is even a picture of a human being, a roughly sketched head in semi-profile.

  A total of nearly 10 kilometres (6¼ miles) of tunnels meander within the mountain. We visitors trundle round on a little electric train. The lighting comes on automatically at each stopping point, just for the few minutes when the train comes to a halt. This minimises our impact on the pictures.

  The cave, which is located on a large farming estate, is managed by the family that owns the estate. Locals have known of it for several hundred years, and generation after generation has visited it to scrawl their names on the walls. But systematic archaeological research began only in the 1950s.

  Frédéric Plassard, the son of the present family, grew up near the cave. He now works here full-time, but has also earned a doctorate in archaeology at the University of Bordeaux. We sit talking for a long time on a bench in the mouth of the cave, in the cool shade of the oak trees, and I try to understand what impelled people 15,000 years ago to make their way into the darkness of the cave to produce these works of art.

  There’s nothing particularly odd about the fact that they went into the cave, says Plassard. That can be put down to normal human curiosity. People have always wandered around in the cave; we can see that from the eighteenth and nineteenth century scribblings. The Magdalenians had lamps just as we do, although they were simple stone lamps that burned animal fat, and it only takes about half an hour to walk a kilometre (⅔ mile) into the mountainside.

  The remarkable thing is the art. It is so well executed that it must have been produced by highly specialised artists. Plassard thinks there were only three or four of them. They may have produced all the works of art on a single occasion, in the course of a few hectic hours. Their work didn’t necessarily have to be seen. Creating the pictures was more important than viewing them.

  The European cave paintings represented something very special for the people of the time, of that Plassard is convinced. He points out that there are only about 20,000 known cave paintings in the whole of Europe, although the people of the Ice Age lived here for 30,000 years – fewer than one a year for the entire European population of several thousand people. By comparison, the Aboriginal people of Australia have produced millions of rock paintings.

  There is one myth that Plassard would like to scotch straight away. Archaeologists used to think that Ice Age artists grew increasingly skilful over the millennia. The animals at Font-de-Gaume, for instance, with their perfect proportions and perspective, are more sophisticated than the clumsier horses in the cave at Pech Merle, which is a few thousand years older. However, the 1990s saw the discovery of the cave at Chauvet, further east in southern France. The art there is peerless – a multiplicity of skilfully depicted polychrome animals. The painting of these pictures may have started 32,000 years ago, as far back as the time of the Aurignacian culture.

  This means that we humans have had full potential to produce figurative art for at least that long. Nor should we forget the ivory flutes and tiny statuettes from the Swabian Jura, the oldest being over 40,000 years old. There have been masters, as well as less high-calibre artists, for as long as humans have inhabited Europe.

  Sitting in the mouth of the cave, we also discuss theories advanced by the French archaeologist Jean Clottes and his South African colleague David Lewis-Williams. This duo seem to be the main ideologues represented in the region around Les Eyzies. Jean Clottes’s books, above all – both the popular science books and the more academic works – are on sale everywhere in shops and museum gift shops. Their theories can be summarised just as the guide in the horse cave of Les Combarelles put it: creating pictures in caves was a way for shamans to acquire spiritual powers.

  Frédéric Plassard agrees that the shaman hypothesis is reasonable, though very hard to prove. He urges caution. There may have been different kinds of motive in the course of a period lasting over 30,000 years, in an area stretching from the Atlantic seaboard to Siberia.

  Jean Clottes and David Lewis-Williams deploy three lines of evidence in their arguments. The first of these is their own profound knowledge of such images. That is uncontested. Clottes, for example, was one of the leaders of the research carried out in the Chauvet cave.

  The second part of their argument is more or less accepted by most archaeologists and anthropologists. Clottes and Lewis-Williams draw parallels between the European artists of the Ice Age and traditional hunter-gatherer peoples in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Their books draw on sources including descriptions of Siberian nomads in the anthropological literature, and their own visits to Native Americans in California and the San people (Bushmen) of South Africa. One of the most important documents comprises over 12,000 pages of interviews of San people, from the end of the nineteenth century to a few decades later by the German linguist Wilhelm Bleek, his sister-in-law Lucy Lloyd and Bleek’s daughter Dorothea.

  Many of the parallels described by Clottes and Lewis-Williams are undeniably striking. In the shamanistic world view, the universe is often divided into three layers: earth, the domain of us ordinary mortals; the heavens; and the underworld and/or the dark waters of the underworld. Certain animals have the power to reach the heavens or the underworld. Waterfowl, for instance, have access to all three levels, as they can fly and swim, and snakes can slither down into the underworld. Such animals can help shamans to travel to the spirit world.

  The caves could represent a way of approaching the underworld, and thereby the spirits and the dead. Lewis-Williams writes about how the rock wall in the cave could act as a membrane – indeed, as the very border between the human and the spirit world. He believes that the artists literally saw the images of animals projected on the walls. All they really needed to do was fill in their internal images. Maybe they had worked themselves up into a trance through lack of sleep, drugs, rhythmic music and frenetic dancing, through the high levels of carbon dioxide in some of the caves, or simply through the sensory deprivation that affects anyone who spends a significant amount of time alone in a dark cave. Although they may not have been in a trance while they were actually painting the pictures, he believes they were reproducing images that had appeared to them in a trance.

  The third aspect of the evidence presented by Clottes and Lewis-Williams is the most controversial. They believe that the first art originated not only in the trance of the shamans, but – above all – in the way the human brain typically functions when in a state of hallucination or psychosis. For example, they interpret the zigzag patterns found on 70,000-year-old stones in the South African cave of Blombos as representing light phenomena that appear to many people suffering from an attack of migraine. According to Clottes and Lewis-Williams, these phenomena are a kind of mild hallucination. In their view, the mammoths, horses and bison found in cave art represent more profound hallucinations.

  Personally, I am sceptical about whether these cave paintings represent hallucinations. In my view, simple human creativity is quite sufficient as an explanation, possibly intensified by a trance-like state.

  Chapter Seven

  The First Dog

  Some of my relatives remained in the region around Spain and south-western France, while others with our shared maternal lineage migrated southwards. They crossed the Strait of Gibraltar into North Africa, moving along the coastline, into the mountains of Kabylia and as far southward as Senegal. Their descendants can be found there to this day. We know this thanks to the presence of mitochondria belonging to the U5b1 haplogroup in these regions. They are rare, admittedly, but they do exist.

  Others began to migrate northwards when the worst of the cold was over. They followed the reindeer that were their main prey. Some of them went directly northwards along the river that we today know as the Rhine.

  About 14,700 years ago, the climate in northern Europe began to grow a great deal warmer. The steppe filled with trees such as birch, willow
and aspen. Deciduous woodland of this kind is not a suitable habitat for reindeer, as it provides nothing for them to eat in winter. My forebears in the Rhine Valley had to adjust rapidly to hunting other animals, such as elk (moose), deer and beaver – a major change.

  Two of my relatives died near today’s Bonn: a man in his fifties and a woman of about 20. Their companions dug a grave, laid them in it side by side and scattered copious amounts of red pigment over them. As grave goods, the dead were given a fine hairpin made of bone, a patterned piece of antler and a deer’s tooth painted red. And they were accompanied to the realm of the dead by a dog. This must have represented a major offering, the greatest gift they could have been given.

  The burial find, known as Bonn-Oberkassel, has been dated as being about 14,500 years old, from just after the end of the Ice Age Magdalenian culture. DNA analysis of the man’s and the woman’s mitochondria shows that both belonged to the U5b1 haplogroup through their maternal lines. That is the group I belong to, which means that the two people in the grave and I had a common foremother who lived a few thousand years earlier. They were the children and grandchildren of ‘Ursula’, just as I am.

  But the really significant point about the Bonn-Oberkassel grave is not that my distant relatives lie buried there. The most important find is the dog’s skull. This is the most ancient dog on which there is a scientific consensus. It meets all the possible criteria that anyone can establish for an early dog. Its appearance is right, the time is right, the place is right and the dog’s DNA set is right.