The Cave Painters

by Gregory Curtis

  Whenever the scientists descend into the cave, a state guide must be present as well. He remains outside to make sure that no unauthorized person goes in. The entrance to the cave lies at the end of a stone walkway built around the side of the cliff. A thick metal door that requires two keys bars the entrance. The state guide has one key and the scientists have the other, so no one, authorized or not, can enter surreptitiously. Since Chauvet was discovered, its ownership has been the subject of many enervating lawsuits involving the various owners of the land, the nation of France, and the discoverers, particularly Jean-Marie Chauvet. Although the cave is named for him, he has found more frustration and disappointment than joy in the aftermath of his discovery.

  But the care of those first explorers, the strict security that has been imposed from the beginning, and the precautions that were at the core of Jean Clottes's plan for studying and exploring the cave have preserved it in the state in which it was found. And what a cave it is! Just as Breuil's Battle of the Aurignacian upset the accepted prehistoric chronology of that day, the discovery of Chauvet has upset the chronologies of both Breuil and Leroi-Gourhan as well as a host of other time-honored assumptions about the nature and development of prehistoric art. Various laboratories have done radiocarbon dating on some forty-five samples taken from different places throughout the cave. The results show that there were two or perhaps three periods when people entered the cave. One sample was 22,800 years old, but that date is the only one from that era and is therefore uncertain. Seven dates fall between 27,000 and 26,000 years ago, although no paintings date to this period. Twenty-two of the radiocarbon dates come from 32,000 to 30,000 years ago. Some of these come from carbon on the ground, but others come directly from paintings where the artists used charcoal pigment for black, proving that the art was as old as the remains on the floor. (Three samples came from the two confronting rhinos below the panel of horses.) A cave named La Grande Grotte at Arcy-sur-Cure has paintings that date to 28,000 years ago. It is the next-oldest cave after Chauvet. Some of the art in Cosquer is, as I have said, 27,000 years old. The next-oldest after that, which is 25,000 years old, is in caves Cougnac and Pech-Merle, both far to the north in central France. So the art in Chauvet is at least 4,000 years older than any other known cave art.

  But the art in Chauvet is not only old, it is also just as sophisticated as any of the art that appeared later, including that in Las-caux, which was painted 14,000 years after Chauvet. This, as I've mentioned, upsets the theory that art had crude beginnings and became more sophisticated over time, a theory that had prevailed since scholars began to recognize prehistoric art for what it was, and that had been the foundation of intricate chronologies of different styles by Breuil and Leroi-Gourhan. The paintings in Chauvet show a mastery of line and coloring and of perspective that is the equal of any art in caves or, in truth, of any art anywhere in the world. Also, there is a sense of drama, of motion, of action—lions on the hunt with gleaming eyes, horses at the gallop—that is superior even to Lascaux. Craig Packer, a specialist on African lions of today, told Jean Clottes he had often seen the same expression in the eyes of lions living in Tanzania. In order for the ancient hunters to have seen that expression and record it so perfectly, Packer said, they must have gotten as close to the lions as he, Packer, had been. “But the difference,” he said, “is that myself, I was inside my four-by-four.”

  Yet, old as it is, and impressive as the art is, Chauvet is also similar to the caves that came after it. It has themes found in all the caves. There are hands, dots, and geometric signs; there are human figures that are rather abstract; and there are animals including the standard menagerie of horses, bison, rhinos, mammoths, and cattle. Chauvet stands at the beginning—the sudden, seemingly spontaneous beginning—of a tradition that lasted for the next 20,000 years.

  The tradition endured, but Chauvet shows that its details changed. There are more than 420 animals painted or engraved on the walls of the cave, but only 345 have been positively identified. Of these, 81 percent are dangerous animals like lions, mammoths, rhinos, and bears that the Stone Age people seldom hunted for food. At Lascaux there are just seven lions, one rhino, one bear, and no mammoths. Perhaps, as I suggested earlier, the ancient hunters successfully reduced the number of dangerous animals so that they became less of a threat. That would mean, inevitably, that the myths of these prehistoric societies would change as well. At least some of the stories based on dangerous animals would drop away and new ones based on different species would take their place, and the kinds of animals prevalent in the art in the caves would change as well.

  Three features of Chauvet need special mention. The famous bear skull found carefully placed upon a rock is just as astonishing as the art because the arrangement has every appearance of being an altar. It is located in a room with a rather low ceiling. The floor is lowest in the center and moves up from there gradually, almost in tiers, until it meets the walls. All in all, the chamber looks rather like an amphitheater with the rock and skull at center stage.

  Sometime in the dimness of the past, the rock fell from the ceiling of the cave and broke into several pieces. A Paleolithic hunter placed the skull at the edge of the largest piece of rock. The lower jaw is missing, but the upper jaw with its long canine teeth sticks out over the edge of the rock. Pieces of charcoal under the skull show that someone had built a fire on the rock. The pieces of charcoal have a radiocarbon date of more than 30,000 years ago. The skull, which shows no sign of flames, was placed there after the fire had gone out.

  There are lots of cave bear bones throughout the cave, including more than 190 skulls. It is possible that someone picked up a skull at random and put it on the rock for no reason in particular, perhaps even someone who wandered in after Paleolithic times. But there are other remains near the rock that make it almost certain that the skull was put there not at random but on purpose. A second bear skull lies on the floor only inches from the rock. More than 45 other bear skulls are close to the rock. Most of them lie within six yards of it. They are not in any discernible pattern, but still they are there and people must have brought them there. It's true that running water and scavenging animals can move bones in a cave. But if that were the case here, why are there only skulls and not a wide variety of bones? And one of the skulls has two black lines, apparently from the burnt end of a torch. That means it was already a skull marked with lines when it was brought here, not a head with the flesh still on it. Somehow, some way, this room was a shrine to cave bears, which were honored in unknowable rituals.

  In another part of the cave two bear bones—humeri, in fact— were stuck upright into the cave floor, each one near a bear skull. Two bear teeth were put in small hollows in a rock. The bones stuck into the floor and small objects placed in cracks and hollows make Chauvet similar to many other caves, including Les Trois-Freres. No other cave has a bear skull on a rock or a collection of bear skulls brought into a room. But the bones in the floor and crevices show a similarity of beliefs across a wide area and through many millennia.

  There is no complete human figure in Chauvet, but there are six human elements. They all appear in the End Chamber, the deepest part of the cave, and they form a strange collection—five vulvas and one thin arm ending in thin, stick fingers. Three of the vulvas are right at the entrance to the End Chamber and two near the rear; all of them are nearly six feet from the floor. Three are engraved and two are painted in black, but in form they are nearly identical. A horizontal arc lies across the top of two lines that meet in a V. These three lines form a triangle. Then there is a single vertical line where the two sides of the V meet. Four of the vulvas are isolated on the wall. The fifth one, however, along with the thin arm and fingers, is part of a scene that could be from an ancient myth, a myth that first appears here in Chauvet, then reappears in classical mythology, and survives even today.

  This mysterious scene is part of one of the most intense and animated compositions in all of cave art. It streams
across the left wall of the End Chamber, where it is centered on an opening in the wall shaped roughly like an upside-down V. A slab inside the opening has a painting of a horse. All the animals, including the horse, are facing left. The ones to the right of the opening— a pack of lions that seem to be in a frenzied hunt for the herd of bison just before them and a strange mammoth with round feet— all appear to be rushing toward the upside-down V. Those on the left of the opening, rhinos mostly and more lions, appear to be rushing out of it.

  Well to the right of this masterpiece and entirely separate from it, a large rock formation hangs from the ceiling. It ends in a pendant that could hardly be more phallic. It is painted with various figures all around it, but the view from the entrance to the chamber shows a curious scene. A bison, or at least something with the head of a bison, appears crouched over a vulva painted with black lines in the standard triangular shape. Here, however, the interior of the triangle is filled in with black shading. Also painted in black lines are two legs, one on either side of the triangle. Each leg has a fat thigh and a knee, but below the knee the legs narrow and end in a point rather than feet. This is clearly the painting of a woman. Her upper half either never existed or was erased so that the artist could draw the bison's head. The head is shaded in with black as well and has an intense, leering white eye. There is a black line for the bison's hump. But just at his neck another black line, rather fainter than the others, suggests a thin arm that, like the arms of the Sorcerer in Les Trois-Freres, ends in a human hand.

  The painting of the woman has never been seen except in photographs. The walkways that protect the floor of the cave do not extend very far into the End Chamber. From the point at which they end, only the beast is visible. Then an inventive archaeologist named Yanik Le Guillou attached a digital camera to a collapsible metal arm and succeeded in taking pictures around the entire surface of the pendant. The photographs revealed for the first time that the bison-man was beside a woman.

  Of course, even though it is a bison and not a bull, this painting makes one think of the myth of Zeus in the form of a bull carrying Europa to Crete and raping her. Minos, who became ruler of Crete, was conceived in that rape. An angered god later made Minos’ own wife become enamored of a bull. She gave birth to the Minotaur, part bull and part man, who lived in the Labyrinth, which is a kind of cave. And the art on the walls of the ruined palaces of the ancient civilization on Crete shows young men leaping over the back of a charging bull in some sort of public spectacle. Today in Aries and the surrounding countryside, just slightly to the west of Chauvet, young men dressed in white enter circular arenas where they try to snatch knitted balls off the tips of the horns of a charging bull and then run to safety. And across southern France and northern Spain, where painted caves are concentrated, traditional bloody bullfights endure, which end usually when the matador plunges a sword into the base of the bull's neck and down into its heart.

  All these associations are so close and fit so well that it is difficult not to believe that they are proof of a direct heritage. But that heritage may not be there after all. Yanik Le Guillou, the archaeologist who put the camera on the end of a pole, is a thin, dark man, erudite and contemplative. He sent me a letter with a persuasive warning against assuming too much. “This kind of arm and fingers,” he wrote, “is similar to what we know about Upper Paleolithic human hand and arm drawings. But in those cases we don't have a bull with a human hand, but a human with a bison mask or head. Be careful, this has nothing to do with Picasso or with the Minotaur.” He has shrewd reasons for saying this. He continued: “The Minotaur is a bull because the bull was the principal symbol of strength and the principal dangerous animal in (Late) Neolithic times. Besides that, the bull could be domesticated, so eventually you have the possibility of taking power over him. But in Paleolithic times the principal dangerous animals are lions, mammoths, cave bears, and rhinoceroses. In Paleolithic times there is no domestication or even the beginnings of pre-domestication. The bull doesn't contain the strength of nature. The power in animals, like the power in nature, is not through the bull. The Mino-taurisation of our bull is a snap judgment. There is no filiation. Except in the mind of people who desperately look for original filiations.”

  I guess I could be one of those people. “Just let your mind go, but never in contradiction with the facts,” he said later in the letter. “That's the archaeologist's way and the way I try to look at these drawings.” But when I let my mind go, it goes straight to the Minotaur, although I know that Yanik's warning is prudent. I'm sure I should heed it more than I will in the following sentences. European culture began somewhere. Why not right here, where someone painted a woman and a bison-man on a stone pendant 32,000 years ago? That coupling of human and beast is embedded so deeply in our psyche that it has endured in myth and spectacle ever since.

  We can see by traces left on the floor and by a few lines or dots painted even in the farthest depths of Chauvet that the ancient people went everywhere in the cave no matter how difficult the passage became. To explore a small passage beyond the End Chamber, someone went thirteen feet straight down using the wall as support, and then slid through some narrow openings before climbing more than six feet to gain a small overhang. After pushing into every last corner of the cave, the artists chose only certain walls for their paintings, ignoring others that would appear to be equally suitable. They made the paintings in Chauvet quickly, and once done, the paintings were seldom visited again.

  In fact, it could be that they were never visited again. Perhaps cultural reasons prevented it or perhaps a landslide or some other natural event had covered the entrance. The hunters made a fire in the End Chamber in front of the pendant with the woman and the bull. Its purpose was probably to produce charcoal to use in making the paintings. Today the floor in the chamber is littered with charcoal fragments. If there had been even a single later visit, those fragments would have been trampled into dust. At Chauvet, as opposed to caves like Les Trois-Freres and Lascaux, there are no large walls with hundreds of engravings, one superimposed on another. To make that many engravings required repeated visits by a number of different individuals. But at Chauvet there are so few human traces left in the cave other than the art—some hearths and charcoal, a few flint blades, the bear skull on the rock, some rocks piled intentionally here and there, and a trail of footprints—that the number of people who came into the cave must have been few and the number of entries few indeed. Whatever purpose the paintings served apparently lasted for generation after generation without the paintings needing to be visited, worshiped, or even so much as seen. Nor did the paintings need to be re-created in cave after cave. If that had been the case, the 20,000 years the cave-painting culture lasted would have produced far more caves than there are, even assuming there are twice or three times as many caves as we presently know still undiscovered. Evidently, once a cave was painted, it remained potent for eons.

  There was, however, at least one visitor who explored Chauvet about 27,000 years ago, long after the paintings were finished. Judging by the size of the footprints and by two prints left on the walls by a clay-stained hand, the visitor was about ten years old. The child carried a torch and touched it to the wall regularly, leaving a series of charcoal marks. These brushes against the stone served two purposes. They knocked off the ash that forms at the top of a torch just as it does on the end of a cigarette. The marks also described a path so the child could find the way out of the cave. The torch proves that the child wasn't lost, but had entered the cave prepared to explore it. There are no other tracks; the child was there alone. What was happening? Was it just an adventurous and inquisitive kid or was it some special ritual where for some reason a child was sent into the cave alone once every few thousand years? Either way, that child was the last visitor to Chauvet until Jean-Marie Chauvet and his two friends let themselves down through a hole in the ceiling late one December afternoon in 1994.

  After Cosquer and Chauvet, Jean Clottes
never suspected that the third great controversy of his career would last so long or turn so personal. In fact, he had no premonition that it was even coming and he remains bewildered and frustrated by it to this day— especially since the onslaught followed what he thought was one of the most fruitful, even joyous, periods in his career.

  The problems began in September 1996 when he and David Lewis-Williams, a South African anthropologist, published a book called Les chamanes de la prehistoire: Trans et magie dans les grottes ornees {The Shamans of Prehistory: Trance and Magic in the Painted Caves). This was a major attempt by two leading figures to interpret prehistoric art. The two risked this approach even though interpretation had become less and less common since Leroi-Gourhan's spectacular attempt had eventually collapsed under its own weight. Clottes and Lewis-Williams proposed that often— not always, but often—the art had been created by tribal shamans who were trying to reproduce the visions they saw while in a magic trance. They said that the shamans could have induced their trances by many different methods, including drugs.

  When Shamans appeared, Jean Clottes was part of a group of about a dozen specialists doing research in the caves in the Pyrenees. From time to time they would meet for two days in Toulouse in order to discuss their work. During those meetings, there was never a single discussion concerning the interpretation of the art nor, by extension, of Jean's new book and its thesis. At Chauvet in 1998, while Jean was directing the first archaeological investigation of the cave, the seven specialists in Paleolithic art who were part of the team, all of them longtime friends and associates, never mentioned the book during the month they were there except— and this was worse than not mentioning it at all—in a kidding manner. The most aggravating slight came from a guide at a cave named Isturitz-Oxocelhaya in the western part of the Pyrenees. The small store at the cave had all the other books by Jean Clottes but not Shamans. Why not? “Oh,” the guide said, “it's not scientific. It's just a crazy notion.” The reviews of the book were about equally mixed—favorable, unfavorable, and neutral—but the unfavorable reviews were often virulent and mocking. One had a title that has become notorious: “Membrane and Numb Brain. A Close Look at a Recent Claim for Shamanism in Paleolithic Art.”