This is where the conflict between religion and science about human evolution began. That conflict was just as virulent and politicized in the nineteenth century as it is today, or perhaps even more so, since Darwin's ideas were new then and more easily ridiculed. And there were many serious and thoughtful people in the scientific community who were as confused and belligerent about the question of human origins as the church. Not every scientist accepted evolution. Rudolf Virchow, a German who was the founder of scientific pathology, attacked evolution virulently at every opportunity. Even among those who accepted evolution there were constant battles over what exactly it meant.
The nineteenth century was obsessed with trying to define, describe, and rank human races. Darwin's theory provoked endless arguments about whether the various races had had a common ancestor or different ones among the apes. Much depended on the answer because if the different races had different ancestors that would help explain the supposed superiority of some races over others. Everything about this debate sounds ugly to a modern sensibility.
There was another assumption among scientists of the time that is less grating but was no less misleading. Today science holds that evolution is neutral and certainly amoral. Evolution does not yearn for perfection but merely for survival. But scientists in the nineteenth century believed that evolution also meant progress, which is why many of the earliest scientists to adopt evolutionary views were also political progressives or radicals.
The brilliant Gabriel de Mortillet in France had such extreme politics that he had to live in exile for fifteen years. He believed in what he called “the law of progress of humanity.” His influence was pervasive. He thought that evolution not only caused humanity to improve physically over time but also caused humanity to improve culturally as well. Neanderthals were slow-witted brutes; Cro-Magnons were a definite improvement, but their culture, those carvings on ivory and pierced seashells, was nothing more than a crude beginning that with thousands of years of evolution would eventually flower in ancient Greece, Renaissance Italy, or, for that matter, nineteenth-century France.
As new discoveries appeared, a varying mixture of science and aesthetics was often used to classify them. The theory was that just as a skeleton that had some features like those of apes must be older than a skeleton with only human characteristics, which is true enough on the whole, crude, unsophisticated tools or art must be older than sleeker, better-designed artifacts, which it turns out may or may not be true. De Mortillet's idea that culture evolved just as species evolved led to the belief that early humans such as the Cro-Magnons made only crude tools and crude decorations because they were not capable of doing anything better. According to de Mortillet, people in the Ice Age developed their tools only in response to specific needs. They had not evolved enough to think abstractly outside this simple cause-and-effect relationship. Since they couldn't think abstractly, they could not have had religion, and without religion they could not have had art. In particular, they couldn't have made the paintings that had been found from time to time in caves.
Caves with prehistoric paintings were known and had been visited repeatedly over many centuries. They were not misunderstood, exactly; better to say they were not comprehended. In fact, the paintings in caves were bewildering, completely unintelligible, frightening. In 1458 Pope Calixtus III, who was from Valencia, condemned Spaniards living in the northern mountains for performing rites in the “cave with the horse pictures.” (The Pope's phrase leads to the tantalizing speculation that some remnants of Ice Age religion survived until the mid-fifteenth century.) At Rouffignac, a cave in the Dordogne with marvelous paintings on a large, low roof, graffiti are mixed everywhere among the paintings. Many of the graffiti have eighteenth-century dates, including a cross drawn by a priest who had been brought in to exorcise demons and sanctify the room. Niaux, a beautiful and important cave at the edge of the Pyrenees, has numerous graffiti where visitors over the years have scratched or painted their names. One of the oldest is “Ruben de la Vialle,” the name of a man who left his mark in 1660. His inscription is only a yard away from large, well-preserved images of bison and ibex. In 1864, two hundred years after de la Vialle's visit, a scholar named Felix Garrigou, who was himself a prehistorian, visited Niaux and later wrote in his notebook, “There are paintings on the wall. What can they be?”
The paintings were seen by these people and many others, but except for a line or two in a notebook or in an occasional letter, they were never written about. Since the visitors in the caves could not even begin to understand what they were, the paintings might as well have been invisible. The teachings of the church couldn't account for them, while the teachings of science, especially de Mortillet's doctrine of cultural evolution, couldn't account for them either. If mentioned at all, they were dismissed as frauds, as the work of Roman soldiers, or with some other fanciful explanation.
Mistakes taint science; they also cause tragic lives. Eventually science corrects its mistakes, but tragedy can't be undone. The first victim of the belief in cultural evolution was an estimable Spanish scholar and aristocrat named Marcelino Sanz de Sautuola. Events would prove that he was not only a talented intuitive scientist but also a visionary. His life was blessed and cursed because in 1879 he discovered on his family's land the beautiful painted ceiling in the cave known as Altamira.
Sautuola had earned a degree in law, but he had an amateur's scientific interest in the natural history of his ancestral lands and the neighboring countryside in northern Spain. He read and explored, and he added to his collection of local insects, minerals, and fossils. In 1878, just a year before his fateful discovery, Sautuola traveled to Paris to attend the World Exposition. Once there, he was particularly attracted to an exhibit of prehistoric tools and small objects of art that had been found in France. The experience thrilled and inspired him, particularly since he was able to meet Edouard Piette, who was then one of the luminaries of French prehistory and a fervent collector of prehistoric artifacts. Sautuola had long conversations with Piette about the artifacts and the proper ways to excavate a site.
Once home, he began excavating around the countryside, particularly in various caves in the region. His sole intent was to find prehistoric objects like those he had seen in Paris. That was how in November 1879 Sautuola came to be digging in the floor of Altamira. The story ofthat afternoon is now famous. Sautuola was forty-eight at the time, a slender, balding man with thick, curly sideburns connected by a luxurious mustache. He had a young daughter named Maria whom he had brought to the cave with him. As her father concentrated on his excavations, Maria ran playfully in and out of the cave and here and there in the large, low room where her father was working. For no particular reason she looked up and saw what she later called “forms and figures” on the roof. “Look, Papa,” she cried. “Oxen!”
Papa looked up and there was Altamira's great painted ceiling. Over twenty yards long, it is covered with vivid yet delicate paintings of bison, almost fully life-sized, that appear to be tumbling across the sky as if they had been tossed by some giant hand. Sautuola was so dumbfounded that he burst out laughing. He must have recognized the absurdity of his intense focus on his careful excavations when rich treasures beyond his dreams were in plain sight only a few feet above his head. Finally his enthusiasm overwhelmed him and he could hardly speak.
I like to think that it was at this precise moment that Sautuola made the brilliant deduction that the paintings came from the Stone Age, that they were made by the same people who had made the tools, carvings, and other objects that he was finding in the floor of the cave and that he had seen in the World Exposition. That deduction earned him the respect of history and little but contempt during his lifetime. Even if his superb intuition only crystallized into words somewhat later, after he had recovered his composure, Sautuola must have seen those paintings from the first moments without any clouds of prejudice or even confusion. He knew what he was seeing in a painted cave when no one before him
had. That day in November 1879, as Marcelino Sanz de Sautuola stood speechless below the painted ceiling of Altamira, was the first time we know of that an artist from the distant Stone Age touched the soul of a modern person.
Sautuola approached Juan Vilanova y Piera, the leading paleontologist in Spain, who had the good sense to visit the cave in person, something Sautuola's most vehement detractors rarely bothered to do. Vilanova quickly concluded that the paintings were indeed the work of prehistoric people and gave a lecture saying so. That carried the news across Spain and created a rush of visitors similar to the excitement that would follow the discovery of Lascaux sixty-one years later. The king of Spain himself came to see the marvels. These expressions of local support and acceptance were the last happy moments for Sautuola. Only a few months later, in early 1880, he published a cautiously written pamphlet titled Brief Notes on Some Prehistoric Objects from the Province of Santander. He was well aware that claiming the paintings were the work of Stone Age people would expose him to controversy and that he would be a mere amateur confronting the orthodoxy of the scientific world. Since he wanted to avoid trouble if he could, he began his pamphlet with the dullest information—technical analysis of stone tools, ornaments, and remains of food—before turning to the paintings. Here he was more tentative still. He wrapped his assertions about the validity of the paintings in prose so convoluted that it's nearly impossible to follow what he is saying and so tortured that his internal anguish practically moans behind every word: “It is doubtless that by repeated discoveries, which cannot come under any doubt at all, that the present has proved that already man, when still not possessing more room than caves, produced, and with similarity, upon horns and elephant trunks, not only his own figure, but also the animals he saw, it would not be adventurous to admit that if, in that epoch, such perfect reproductions were made, engraving them upon hard surfaces, then there is no founded motive for completely denying that the paintings are also of such an ancient procedure.” (Translation: Since it's been proved that Stone Age people engraved realistic pictures of animals on hard surfaces like horns, there is no reason to doubt that the paintings are just as old.) This passive, cumbersome, frightened, almost incomprehensible sentence ruined Sautuola's life.
Tortured and tentative as he was in his writing, Sautuola in person confidently stood by his conclusions. A few months after the publication of the pamphlet, he and Vilanova attended the International Congress of Anthropology and Prehistoric Archaeology in Lisbon, with every august presence in European prehistory in attendance. Vilanova made a formal presentation. When he displayed drawings of some of the paintings in the cave, the disbelief was palpable. Emile Cartailhac of France, the most respected personage in prehistoric archaeology, pointedly walked out of the lecture, making no effort to disguise his disgust.
His response was foreordained, since Sautuola had sent Car-tailhac a copy of his pamphlet only to receive a contemptuous reply that these paintings pretending to be of prehistoric wild cattle looked nothing like the real thing. (Sautuola could have responded that they don't look like cattle because they are bison.) Then, to make matters worse, de Mortillet warned Cartailhac that some Spanish Jesuits were behind a secret plot to embarrass pre-historians at the International Congress as a way of attacking evolution. The paintings at Altamira were nothing but clever forgeries that were part of the plot. No Stone Age artist could have painted with such skill. Someone had duped Sautuola, or perhaps he was himself part of the conspiracy. Cartailhac said it was all “a vulgar joke by a hack artist” and refused an invitation from Vilanova to visit the cave. He had taken a personal dislike to the two Spanish gentlemen because they persisted in pressing their case at other meetings during the congress. The official report of the event does not mention Altamira at all. Sadly, this atmosphere of intrigue, jealousy, mendacity, and paranoia contaminated the world of pre-historians between 1880 and 1900 and, with somewhat less intensity, still does today.
Cartailhac was only thirty-five. He was a thin, slight man with very thick, wavy hair that was black as onyx. A thin mustache and beard spread in tiny curls around his jaw. There were thick, dark circles under his eyes, which were unusually deeply set. He tended to regard the world with a faraway gaze.
Cartailhac had risen rapidly to his eminent position and he combined the certainty of youth with a reputation that made him immune to challenge, something that usually comes only with age. Sautuola had annoyed him so much that he could not confine his vindictiveness to the congress. Several months later, in 1881, he dispatched a man named Edouard Harle to visit the cave and report on what he found. Harle dutifully wrote that the paintings were obvious forgeries. He claimed they were too skillful and the paint was too new for them to be genuine. But the point that clinched his argument was that prehistoric people could have lit the cave only with torches but there were no traces of smoke on the walls or ceiling of the cave. The paintings must have been made with modern artificial light that produced no smoke. Cartailhac gleefully published Harle's paper in the influential journal he edited. Now other mocking papers about Altamira began to appear, not only in France but—painfully for Sautuola—in Spain as well.
Still, Sautuola and Vilanova persevered. They presented papers at the French Congress for the Advancement of Science in both 1881 and 1882 and at an international congress in Berlin in 1882. No one listened. Cartailhac published his study The Prehistoric Ages in Spain and Portugal in 1886. It did not mention Altamira. By now Sautuola was a broken man. The attacks on Altamira were often personal, but even when they weren't openly personal, he took them as attacks on his honesty. He believed he had offered the world a great treasure and the world had responded by calling him a liar and a scoundrel. Marcelino Sanz de Sautuola, the man who was the first to understand what the cave paintings were, the man who was the first to comprehend that they had been made by prehistoric people, the man who was the first to experience their power as art—that man died prematurely at fifty-seven in 1888, distraught, miserable, unvindicated.
Sautuola's vindication would come, but fourteen years too late to help him. All along there had been a few—a very few—enlightened scholars who believed that the Altamira paintings were genuine. One was Edouard Piette, the distinguished prehistorian who had befriended Sautuola at the Paris World Exposition in 1878. He was building an impressive personal collection of small engravings, statuettes carved from ivory and antlers, and particularly well-made tools, and he believed that people capable of creating these beautiful objects would also be able to make beautiful paintings on the walls of caves. Piette, a kindly man, eventually wrote Cartailhac endorsing the paintings at Altamira, but to no effect.
What did have an effect on Cartailhac, years later, was the evidence of his own eyes, but only after so much evidence had accumulated that he could no longer equivocate about what he was seeing. During the 1890s several ardent amateurs were exploring and making archaeological digs in caves in southern France. One was Leopold Chiron, a small-town schoolteacher and amateur archaeologist from the Ardeche region in southeastern France. While digging at a local cave named Chabot, he noticed a swirl of engraved lines. He was certain the engravings were ancient because they were covered by a film of calcite that could come only with age. The engravings at Chabot are filled with disconnected lines and are notoriously difficult to decipher. Mistakenly, Chiron interpreted the drawing as groups of people and birds with open wings. But he did make tracings and even took photographs. More important, he connected the engravings with the stone tools he was finding on the cave floor and concluded that both were made at the same time by the same people. Chiron announced this conclusion in a paper he published in 1878 in the Revue historique, archeologique, litteraireetpittoresqu.edu Vivarais, a provincial journal that didn't carry much weight in the leading circles of the day. Chiron even wrote the great de Mortillet, who never bothered to reply. De Mortillet was certain of his theories. Why should he bother with the strange, rather challenging ideas of a small-town t
eacher? Chiron, however, was not intimidated. For the next fifteen years he continued to present his discoveries at meetings of provincial scientific societies, where he discussed both Chabot and the engravings he had found in other caves nearby.
In 1895 the owner of a cave named La Mouthe in the Dordogne region dug away an ancient rockfall and exposed a new gallery. Some local boys explored farther into the cave and found engravings. Scientists rushed to the cave, and one found a flat stone with a shallow indentation scraped at one end. This was the first prehistoric lamp to be discovered and recognized for what it was. Since the rockfall had sealed the cave for eons, the engravings could not be forgeries. The lamp solved the puzzle of how the ancient artists had illuminated the caves.
After the discovery at La Mouthe, local amateurs and hobbyists returned to caves where they had noticed paintings or engravings but had paid no attention to them. Francois Daleau, who lived in a region just east of Bordeaux, had dug in a cave named Pair-non-Pair fourteen years earlier. (The name means “even, not even,” the French version of heads-or-tails.) Now he returned to find engravings that had been exposed by his excavations. Since they had previously been covered with dirt that hadn't been disturbed for at least 15,000 years, they could not be forgeries or the pranks of children but had to be the work of the Cro-Magnons. This cave finally convinced de Mortillet, who had the grace to admit his conversion in 1898, shortly before his death.
The Cave Painters Page 5