In another scene, two horses face each other. Their necks are arched. Perhaps they are trying to stare each other down, like the two Pryor Mountain stallions Ransom and I saw. Elsewhere, a lone horse peeks timidly around a corner. His hindquarters are not drawn, so that he seems to be emerging warily from some crevice, perhaps trying to find out if it’s safe to come out. Is the valley scene, filled with chaos, frightening him?
Lots of theories purport to explain the genesis of Chauvet. The one thing that we do know is that the artist, or artists, understood animal behavior. Craig Packer, an expert on African lions and one of the rare scientists who has been allowed inside the cave, came away impressed not only with the art’s quality, but with the depth of the artist’s knowledge. In the scene of two mating lions, Packer told me, both the male and the female lions behave in Chauvet just as he had seen modern lions behave in Africa.
What should we read into Chauvet? Several French authors suggest that Chauvet was the creation of shamans who hoped to evoke the animals’ spirits. Others suggest that the complete Chauvet frieze running through the narrow cave can be understood almost like a modern-day graphic novel. In this view, the artist was telling a story panel by panel. One recent idea suggests that the animals would appear to be alive when tallow-lamp light flickered over their images, creating the illusion of movement.
Chauvet is unique for its grandeur and its individuality of expression. But from the western coast of Spain all the way to Russia’s Ural Mountains, images of horses abound. You could spend a year traveling from site to site and never see them all. Yet despite these vast distances in both space and time—it’s important to remember that the phenomenon of Pleistocene art extends over a period of more than twenty thousand years—there are a few universals. The images are usually peaceful. Violence is rare. A few images have been interpreted by modern researchers to show animals with hunting spears in them, but such depictions are unusual. Humans almost never appear; when they do, only a few are shown injured. And, oddly, landscapes—trees, flowers, rivers, cliffs—never ever appear.
Among the animals routinely depicted, horses seem to hold a special place. They are almost angelic. Stallions during the Pleistocene must have battled the way Ransom and I saw stallions battle in the Pryor Mountains, but the art never shows these confrontations. It never shows mares biting each other, never shows foals being attacked by wolves or lions. Other animals are involved in violence, but, until the very end of the Pleistocene, the horses always seem to be peace-loving.
There are some differences in style, though. Whereas the exquisite Chauvet horses were serious animals, the horses of Lascaux, created about seventeen thousand years ago, are merry little things, delightfully capricious. The renowned author and archaeologist Paul Bahn sees Pleistocene art as “an art of tenderness,” and that is certainly true in the magnificent cave of Lascaux. Lascaux is all about horses in motion. Horses are present in abundance here, accompanied by aurochs, bison, bovines, stags, ibex, and even some large cats.
In Lascaux, the horses’ motto seems to be “Don’t worry. Be happy.” The attitude makes sense: temperatures were warming, but the extensive flat grasslands of the European littoral were still filled with wildlife. It was a great time to be alive. And so Lascaux is filled with joyfulness, a bit of craziness, and plenty of variety. On its walls are dark horses and light horses, pintos and bays, a horse that some people think looks “Chinese” (because it seems to resemble horses in Chinese art) and horses that some say look like tarpans, a now-extinct type of European horse. These horses wander over the cave walls in small bands, just as they wander today.
They are positively prancing in their excitement. Lascaux is full of happy enigmas, like a cow that seems to be leaping over other animals. There are well-fed horses with roly-poly bellies, satisfied mares accompanied by gamboling foals. If that isn’t chaos enough, there’s an upside-down horse, perhaps rolling in the grass, surrounded by other horses. Were all these horses and other animals portrayed as a group? Or did individual artists just create individual horses? At Chauvet, it’s possible to see the art as one huge piece of work, but Lascaux doesn’t have the same sense of unity.
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Elsewhere, the horses are quite different. On a warm May morning, shortly after I visited Isabelle Castenet, I walked up a stream valley in the Basque country to the mouth of Ekain, a painted cave that’s only about fourteen thousand to twelve thousand years old. The walk was an easy one, along an unpaved well-worn cart path that may have been the main route through this valley since the days of the Neanderthals. I had come to see a lesser-known panorama of horses.
Along the way I met a local man to whom I said, “Buenos días.”
He quickly corrected me. In the Basque country, the proper “Good morning” is said in the Basque language, a language unlike any other European language and which may, in fact, have roots that stretch back to the Paleolithic era. I had a frustratingly difficult time wrapping my tongue around the words he repeated to me.
I reached the mouth of the cave and turned around. Spread out below me was excellent horse territory, rich with flower-filled meadows, as in the Wyoming high peaks. Two small streams met just below where I stood. They had carved a slight neck of land that was covered with greenery. Beyond was an even larger, richer valley. Above me rose some steep hills. Pleistocene horses with thick legs would have had little trouble negotiating these slopes.
In the Basque country today live free-roaming Pottok horses. Believed locally to descend directly from Pleistocene stock, these living horses resemble the graceful horses painted on local cave walls. (Studies performed by the geneticist Gus Cothran show that Pottoks and the mustachioed Garranos are indeed related.)
Watching modern Pottok horses can be a noisy experience. The lead mare is often collared and belled, like cows in the Alps. Like their Garrano cousins, the Basque horses allow people to get close—but only so close. They definitely have a critical distance closer than which they prefer humans not come. In the past Pottoks were captured and used for various beast-of-burden tasks such as carrying heavy loads over the mountain passes. In coal mines the little horses were used as pit ponies, condemned to live most of their lives underground, pulling coal-filled carts in the dark. Whenever the poor animals were allowed out into the sunshine—if they ever were—they were blind for days until their eyes could adjust. Many became permanently blind. The early novels of D. H. Lawrence, particularly Sons and Lovers, described the lives of these unfortunates with great compassion.
In the modern era, thankfully, their lives are better. Said to have gentle natures, they are sometimes trained for riding, although this apparently doesn’t always work out well. I spoke to one barn manager who let little children ride them, but only if an adult carefully led each pony by a head strap. “They’re too stubborn,” she told me. “They’re mostly wild and allowed to roam, so they don’t like to do as they are told.”
Pottoks, now sometimes crossed with Arabians or other breeds, have been successful in the show ring, but the pure ponies, left alone on their mountains, occupy a kind of netherworld. They are flighty. I held out a handful of grass to one who had spent the afternoon carrying children on pony rides. He snatched it away, but, like a wild thing, when I tried to put my hand on his head, he was gone in an instant. Chances are that when his work that day was over, he would be turned back out to roam the hills at his leisure, making all of his own decisions, until called up for duty again.
Pottok horses are sometimes called “semi-feral,” but the term is nebulous. “Feral” implies that the horses were once thoroughly domesticated and then escaped to the wild. This is not the case, as far as anyone knows, with either the Pottoks or the Garranos. Local people say these Basque horses have always roamed these hills freely, so would not have “escaped” in the conventional sense of the word. The local archaeologist Pedro Castaños believes that Pottok horse populations plummeted at the close of the Pleistocene, but that wild remnants found
refuge in the Pyrenees and have been there ever since. A more accurate word to describe modern Pottoks might be “semi-managed.”
Throughout my travels in the Basque country, I saw these Pottoks everywhere, and I wanted to know how the horses of Ekain cave compared to these living animals. Tourists cannot go inside the actual cave of Ekain—the drawings are too precious to risk—but an excellent replica of the cave and its art is only a five-minute walk from the mouth of the real cave. A tour guide takes a small number of people through the replica twice. The first tour is done in complete silence; the second is narrated.
The silent experience is sublime. At the cave entrance is a drawing of a horse head, done in charcoal. Walking deeper into the cave, all that’s audible is the slow, soothing drip-drop of water falling into a small pool. On the walls of the central cave are groups of sensitively drawn horses. There are other animals, too—more than sixty in all—but horses are the most common. Some are sketched in great detail, with their coats filled in with red ocher. Some are pinto-like, with coat colors that are black and white, just like some modern-day Pottoks. Others are merely outlined. They look like calligraphy. Yet on other horses, you can see the fine hairs of the fetlocks. Still others have shoulder stripes. Whoever drew these horses took the time to draw them well.
These are stylized works, not at all like the Vogelherd carving, the joyous horses of Lascaux, or the anxious horses of Chauvet. The lines on the cave walls evoke the concept of “horse,” but not specific horses themselves. These horses don’t look ready to rise off the cave walls and come to life. They do not seem to represent specific living animals that the artist once saw. They don’t seem about to prance or to rear if we wait long enough. They are not observing other animals and they are not part of a grand scene.
Instead, the Ekain horses are representatives, or ideals. They reminded me of some of the most stylized images of horses in traditional Japanese art. Using only a few clean lines, these early Iberian artists showed the essence of the horse. The images seem to mean something, and that meaning likely goes far beyond “This is a horse.” Perhaps there was a group of people who adopted the horse as their totem, or maybe just as their mascot. Or perhaps the horse represented a certain characteristic—sociability, maybe—that people admired.
This symbolic horse turns up everywhere in Europe and Asia at this time. Deep inside Monte Castillo, in a cave called El Castillo, where a wall bends at a sharp angle like the outside corner of a house, a graceful reindeer and a horse are paired back-to-back, one on each side of the angle. I had seen many two-dimensional images of this strange pairing, but the three-dimensional reality is celestial. Had the guide allowed it, I would have stood there for quite a long time. The animals seem to be free of gravity. The artist would have had to work at a challenging angle to create this illusion, yet both animals look peaceful. The horse is static. His legs are not depicted in any kind of gait. He has not adopted a noble posture. Rather, his head and neck are relaxed. He is not a particular horse, but a concept: “horse.” The reindeer, too, is relaxed, but he seems, from our modern vantage, to have a gleeful eye. The fine lines of both animals tell us that the artist was highly skilled and could have drawn animals more like those of Lascaux or even Chauvet, but chose not to. Instead, the horse and the reindeer are just there, floating back to back, large and unmoving.
The ethereal reindeer and horse of El Castillo Cave (Courtesy of Paul Bahn)
We can tell from this art that, although horse population numbers were dropping, horses continued to be culturally important. Near Duruthy, France, on the eastern side of the Pyrenees, researchers have discovered what some say is a “shrine” to the horse. The Duruthy shrine—or more conservatively called an “ode to the horse” (as “shrine” implies religious worship)—was created at roughly the same time as Ekain’s horse art and as El Castillo’s horse-and-reindeer pairing. Duruthy researchers have discovered thousands of Paleolithic tools and artifacts at this site, including a horse carved out of sandstone. His muscular shoulders and head, with glaring eye and ears flattened against his head, make him appear to be lunging forward in a threatening posture, like the snaking stallion in the Wyoming mountains.
Evidence of this late-Paleolithic idolization of the horse can be found in the Russian cave of Kapova in the Ural Mountains, six thousand miles to the east of the Pyrenees. Roughly fourteen thousand years old, Kapova is situated in what’s now a nature preserve located north of the Black and Caspian Seas. The cave shows well-nourished horses drawn in red ocher. They have thick necks, plump rumps, and delicate heads. The Kapova horses do not interact with other animals. There is no large scene or story line, as at Chauvet. Instead, the animals are friezelike. One horse trots in front of other animals, looking straight ahead. We don’t know if he was meant to be shown as the leader of the animals or if the artist just set out to sketch various individuals in no special order. Elsewhere in Kapova there’s another line of animals. Here, the horse jogs in the middle of the line, between a mammoth and a woolly rhinoceros.
Another frieze of horses from this time, called the Magdalenian, was done in one of my favorite rock overhangs in France—the Cap Blanc site, located not far from the town of Les Eyzies. This site is still open to the public, and visiting it is a simple matter of buying a ticket. Tours are given at certain specified times, and since I had an hour before I was scheduled to visit, I decided to hike. I descended a narrow path leading from the overhang to a stream below and found myself in an idyllic valley. Across the way I saw another cave entrance. Inside was another beautifully carved horse head. Had the people living at Cap Blanc fifteen thousand years ago decided to go visiting, it would have taken them only minutes to walk down their hill, cross the stream, and enter this other cave.
Why were so many horses created by artists in this area? Were the people who lived at both of these sites members of one extended family who had made the horse their family crest? During the Pleistocene, the relationship between horses and humans may well have been similar to the relationship between Inuit and whales, or between early North Americans and bison. On the island of Great Britain, in Gough’s Cave, sometimes called the “Cave of the Horse Hunters,” researchers have found many horse bones cast off by prehistoric people. The manner in which some of those horse bones are broken suggests that people were eating the marrow inside the bones. The people of Gough’s Cave also carefully removed tendons from the horses’ lower legs, possibly to be used as some kind of binding material.
Given this relationship, it’s logical to assume that the art of the horse was somehow connected to human survival. Perhaps depicting the horse was a way of thanking the horse for the gifts he provided. On the other hand, some French researchers have suggested that the horse, commonly paired with the bull, was a sexual symbol. One researcher asserted that the bull was male and the horse was female. Another Frenchman concluded the opposite: that the horse was male and the bull female. When I asked Lawrence Straus about the symbolism of the horse, he answered: “Who knows?”
What we do know is that the horses depicted in art from about thirty-five thousand years ago to just about ten thousand years ago were created by many different hands, and that the techniques of the artists varied greatly from age to age and from location to location. The creations range from fabulous depictions, those of Chauvet and Lascaux, to the mundane, as at Les Roches. The paleontologist Dale Guthrie, an avid hunter, spent years studying European Ice Age sites and ultimately decided that at least some of the art was mere “graffiti” drawn by teenage boys who were thinking about the horses they intended to hunt. For Guthrie, the human impulse to create art is a natural form of play behavior in which the boys, preparing to become hunters, indulged.
The anthropologist Genevieve von Petzinger cautioned me against thinking of horses in Pleistocene art as representing any one thing. After all, the horses of Lascaux are half the age of the horses of Chauvet. “In all likelihood there is no grand unified theory, no one single meanin
g,” she told me in a phone conversation. “What we’re dealing with is thirty thousand years of history and multiple cultures, each of whom may have had their own reason for using the horse, and even within those individual cultures, they may have had different reasons for depicting that particular animal. It’s always a big problem. People want to know what the art is. Well, it’s probably lots of different things to lots of different people.”
* * *
The horses reflect the ongoing nature of the horse-human partnership that I had first thought about standing with Phyllis Preator atop Polecat Bench. In one form or another, the horses had always been with us, and by the Pleistocene era, Homo sapiens had become sophisticated enough to be able to express their pleasure at this companionship. In Horse, the Canadian author J. Edward Chamberlin summed up the Ice Age artists quite simply as “those who praise horses.”
Nevertheless, while they were praising horses, they were also eating them in great numbers. While there is no clear evidence of North American early people hunting horses, in the Old World record there are a multitude of undisputed sites. Indeed, the history of the predator-prey human-horse relationship stretches all the way back to the days when A. afarensis and the Hipparion mare and foal walked the Laetoli plain. Not far from Laetoli archaeologists have found very primitive stones that may have been used as butchering tools in close association with broken-up horse bones dating to about 3.4 million years ago. Bouri, a 2.5-million-year-old African site, clearly shows tools fashioned by Homo erectus, ancestor to Homo sapiens, near butchered horse bones. This improved ability to gather meat is widely believed to be an important reason why the Homo lineage was able to evolve ever-bigger energy-greedy brains. A vegetarian diet of fruits and grains gleaned from nature would not have provided enough calories to nourish larger brains, so that the ability to find meat, the ability to manipulate objects such as stone weapons, and the evolution of large brains probably went hand in hand.
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