I was awestruck. Evolution had blessed them with some powerful survival tools. How in the world had they found this particular patch? What was built into their senses and their brains that led them out into the middle of a forest to the one place where grass grew?
In those days I had no idea of their deep history, of the events that brought these horses into my care. I knew nothing of the Cretaceous Terrestrial Revolution and the 100-million-year-old emergence of flower power; of the evolution of grasses some 50 million years later or of their gradual spread worldwide. No one had told me anything about the constant and sometimes violent shifting of the tectonic plates that float atop our boiling-soup-kettle planetary interior; or of the sudden chill 34 million years ago; of the extreme heat of 56 million years ago; or the ups and downs of carbon dioxide; or of the near extinction of all horses during the days of Epihippus; or of the Yukon horse; or of Charles Darwin; or even that horses had become extinct on my continent long ago.
But young as I was, I knew even then that Whisper had led me to one of my life’s best memories.
6
THE ARCH OF THE NECK
The steady thunder of horse hooves echoes deep within the human soul.
—TAMSIN PICKERAL, The Horse: 30,000 Years of the Horse in Art
Sometime around 66 million years ago, Spain began attacking France, tectonically speaking. The collision had been a long time coming. Since the days of the Cretaceous Terrestrial Revolution, the Iberian tectonic plate had been slowly creeping northeast, toward the Eurasian plate. The two finally clashed at the end of the dinosaur era. Since then, in a David-and-Goliath shoving match, the tiny Iberian plate has pushed relentlessly against Europe, which has stood its ground, backed by the immensity of Asia.
The offspring of this battle is the Pyrenees, a roughly three-hundred-mile-long rugged mountain range topped by windswept and nearly impenetrable peaks and filled with deep fertile valleys. The Pyrenees run from the Mediterranean to the Bay of Biscay on the Atlantic coast. On a topographic map, the entire range looks like a poorly stitched seam patching Iberia onto Europe.
In reality, though, since the days of the ice ages, these mountains have stood as a sheltering bulwark, protecting living things—including horses and humans—from many of the ravages of cold, snow, and ice. This is why Iberia is said to have been a refugium—a haven—from the ice sheets of northern Europe.
The rising of the Pyrenees was a stroke of good luck for the advancement of human civilization and for the partnership between horses and humans. The mountains created a sheltering infrastructure in which large numbers of people could live comfortably. Geological forces associated with the mountains’ rise carved out interior caverns and rock shelters that were ready-made living spaces, where families could stay for months at a time in close proximity to each other, sharing food, work, and ideas around community fires. Archaeologists have found evidence of such community hearths, around which artisans left such huge piles of debris from their carving of stone and ivory that researchers today, tens of millennia later, can still see exactly where each person sat.
Historians use the term “culture hearth” to describe a place—Mesopotamia, for example—where, for whatever reason, the stars are so well aligned that an immense leap forward in human thought can occur. Culture hearths provide what we today call “connectivity”—the ability to interact with people outside the family. And long ago, the naturally created infrastructure of the Pyrenees region hosted an extensive connectivity—real hearths that nurtured creativity and intellectual advances.
In the form of artifacts we have plenty of solid evidence of this extraordinary culture, showing us that the people’s basic needs were so easily met that they were free to devote much of their energy to the expression of beauty. There was even music: flutes made from the hollow bones of birds have been found in some of these shelters. It was yet another halcyon time, like Messel.
This time, though, the keystone to the nurturing natural system was not thick foliage and ripe fruits, as at Messel, but grass. Grasslands were prolific, while forests were limited. Water rushing off the mountains carried rich topsoil into the river valleys, nourishing grasses and other plants that fed reindeer, horses, mammoths, and other animals. These river valleys were the people’s pantry—a general store, if you will, a ready source of food where the shelves were never bare.
Before I visited the region, I imagined Pleistocene people as desperate hunters, wandering aimlessly through a frozen world looking for food. The truth is the opposite. Despite the icy temperatures, these Pleistocene people lived in a comfortable world. In what would become France, people lived in close proximity under rock overhangs above wide river valleys. In Spain, they lived high above grazing lands in the mouths of massive caves.
These overhangs and caves, carved out by water rushing down through the limestone from the rising Pyrenees, created “neighborhoods.” You didn’t have to live alone. Your friends and family could set up house only a few minutes’ walk away in yet another overhang or cave mouth. This was luxury living, sometimes complete with penthouse suites and balconies.
These sites were permanent, but people did not live permanently at any one site. As hunter-gatherers they moved in a yearly rhythm, from one place to the next—depending on the patterns of nature. But their lives were not haphazard. Just as we return year after year to our favorite summer spots and winter retreats, they returned to the same familiar places season after season.
Pleistocene neighborliness coupled with a rich natural system allowed for the kind of stability that nourishes human culture. Comfortably sheltered and well fed, people had leisure time. They created art, and even fashion, out of whatever was available in the world around them. They carved beads by the thousands to adorn their clothing, using the sinews of horses to sew together those finely tailored costumes. The tusks of mammoths were carved into eyed needles. In one museum I visited, signage explained that these sewing needles were better made than those made by artisans of the Roman Empire. These Pleistocene artisans shaped flint knives as sharp as modern steel knives. I’d always imagined that stone tools were “primitive,” but in France I watched a modern flint knapper make these blades using traditional technology. Touching the knife he had carved, I nearly cut my finger.
In the region north of the Pyrenees, the residences of these people were sometimes quite sophisticated. They often chose living sites with southerly exposures where the sun could shine in. They devoted a lot of time to modifying these spaces. Under some rock overhangs, researchers have found rings carved into the natural stone ceilings that, some scientists speculate, may have been used to hang hides that made walls to protect people in foul weather. Sometimes, archaeologists suggest, these hanging hide “curtains” may even have been used to divide a space into separate rooms. Archaeologists point to clues like these when they suggest that the same people returned year after year. People just passing through would not take the time to create such elaborate arrangements.
On the other hand, the Iberian residences reminded me of modern high-rise condos: one mountain I visited had many caves and cave mouths, and archaeologists have found evidence that many of these mouths were occupied.
In France, the residences, called abris, extend for miles along river valleys, like suburban developments. The neighborhood kids probably played together. When the adults got together, maybe they indulged in the Pleistocene equivalent of quilting parties or knitting evenings, or maybe they told stories for hours around the fire about the one that got away.
Of one thing I am certain: many of those stories had to have been about what the horses were up to that day.
* * *
One thoroughly wet, chilly day in late May 2013, I walked up a gentle, narrow stream valley that fed into southwestern France’s Vézère river. This small vale, called Les Roches, near the village of Sergeac, is like a suburban cul-de-sac. The Vézère, a major regional waterway, was a superhighway along which people could easily tr
avel. Many Ice Age people lived along the Vézère’s high cliffs.
But the small side valley I was walking up was in these days much more intimate. Researchers have found a number of home sites here. Some were occupied thirty thousand years ago, while others were used only a few hundred years ago. Given its long-term popularity, Les Roches must have been prime real estate. As I walked around, I could see why. The Vézère valley is wide and easily accessed by invaders, but this little side stream offered privacy and protection. The streamside habitat created a ready-made hamlet that seemed rather cozy. I could easily imagine comfortably camping here for quite a while.
I was meandering up the vale on a whim, as I’d heard a scientific lecture in New York City months earlier about archaeological artifacts that had been found there. I had no particular goal in mind—I just wanted to see the place. What was it like to live on a Pleistocene side street?
But I lucked out. I encountered Isabelle Castenet, the descendant of a man who helped discover the ancient living sites here. Her family had begun to excavate in the late 1800s, and the family still has strong regional roots.
Castenet, an expert on local history, was happy to chat. She maintains a small museum, full of artifacts discovered by her family members over the past century. Not only was I fortunate enough to encounter her, but, since it was a lousy day and hardly anyone was around, she had plenty of time. Hoping to get a sense of whether the fascination that people elsewhere had for horses held true even here, in this unprepossessing place, I asked her to describe how the people of Les Roches lived.
“During the Pleistocene, there may have been as many as a thousand or even two thousand people living in this whole area at times,” she said, waving her hands out toward the Vézère. In her view, the people probably rarely fought, since they had no real property of value, other than what they made with their own hands. Their survival, she added, probably depended on mutual cooperation. She imagined them living together in harmony and trading work and art from one living site to the next. Her exotic descriptions reminded me of some of the back-to-nature landscapes of the late nineteenth-century French artist Henri Rousseau.
She explained that people here ate mostly reindeer, the region’s most common animal at that time. Curiously, Castenet said, despite this reindeer diet, many of the caves in the region contain a lot of horse art. She showed me some of this art, as well as some images of horses that were etched into bones and onto stones.
Charmingly, the horse art isn’t very good. The artists in this small vale created lots of decorative images, but much of the work is rough, almost childlike. They reminded me of the art our own modern children like to create. The various body parts of the horses don’t fit together. The proportions aren’t right. One horse has a head so heavily indented that his nose looks a bit like a crocodile snout. I won’t say that these artists drew animals like I draw animals (few people are that inept), but the images have none of the astonishing polish of the Vogelherd ivory carving or of the Chauvet Cave paintings.
I was enlightened and fascinated: Then, as today, artistic genius may have been relatively rare. Those with the talent of a da Vinci or a Rembrandt created Pleistocene masterpieces that still thrill us in modern times. Others were less talented but still valued the experience of creativity enough to engage in it and to leave behind a few crude lines etched into stone.
There are many such sites in France, along with the other, more famous sites that contain the most spectacular art. Not far from the Vézère, there’s an electric-powered, open-topped little train that carries scores of tourists about a half mile down into the depths of a cave called Rouffignac, containing numerous masterpieces with many horses. In the replica of the Cave of Lascaux (the real cave, damaged by decades of tourism, is now off-limits to the public) there are joyful bands of Pleistocene horses on the cave walls.
But of all the caves with horses I visited in France, I most treasured those shown to me by Isabelle Castenet on that chilly afternoon, perhaps because while talking with her I finally understood: the people who lived in this little side valley, on their own home street, were quite like us. They engaged in the mundane activities of quotidian life, ate and drank, carved tools, sewed clothes, and in their spare time, they drew what they saw around them. Even if they weren’t particularly talented, they left behind a record of what they saw and of what was important to them. And from this artistic record, it’s apparent that what they loved most was the beauty of the natural world in which they lived.
And the record that they left shows how much they revered horses.
* * *
Spanish Pleistocene art also reveres the horse. Where the French living sites were strung out along rivers, the Iberian sites are often clustered on top of each other. For example, Monte Castillo is a tall, cone-shaped mountain that stands high above the small Cantabrian village of Puente Viesgo, located just a bit west of Bilbao on the northern Iberian coast. Surrounded by three rivers and grass-filled valleys, this stand-alone towering peak reminds me of a very large Egyptian pyramid.
This mountain contains many caves and cave mouths. Archaeologists have found evidence that many of these cave mouths were occupied by people, so that again, this must have been coveted real estate. With commanding views of the grasslands in the river valleys below, you could have kept close watch on the wildlife and ordered up for dinner. In France, most of the caves are long and very narrow, but along the Spanish northern coast underground rivers have carved huge interior spaces that could hold as many as one hundred or more people. In France, people could not gather in the caves, but in Spain these caves may well have served as “community halls”—gathering spots where information could be shared and ideas exchanged. Where the French caves were tight, oxygen-starved spaces, Spanish caverns were immense and downright welcoming.
Welcoming too were the Spanish guides who led me, along with other visitors, through those caves that were open to the public. Touring the popular French sites can be a hassle, particularly in the summer when lines just to buy tickets may require hours of waiting. In comparison, Spain was peaceful. Fewer people visit the Spanish sites (the French government works hard to market to tourists), but the art is equally compelling.
In one large Monte Castillo cave, the Spanish guide told me that Pleistocene people came into the mountain to dance together. (Maybe. Since I didn’t speak Spanish, I couldn’t question her more closely, but I noted her words with an asterisk that reminded me to check up later to see if this was local myth or scientifically documented fact. I found no scientific paper to confirm her statement, but I thought of Edvard Grieg’s “Hall of the Mountain King” and enjoyed the image.)
The archaeologist Lawrence Straus, who has devoted his career to studying Iberian Pleistocene sites, says the larger caverns do show evidence of heavy human use. Straus and his colleagues have found in some of these caves an abundance of butchered horse bones. The people of the French Dordogne seem to have eaten horse meat only occasionally, but Straus and friends say that in Spain Neanderthals and the first Homo sapiens relied heavily on this source of food. The difference may have been due to the greater number of horses then living in Spain as compared to France, but it may also have been due to the lack of reindeer herds in Spain.
Straus and his colleagues have also found that the region’s Neanderthals and Homo sapiens may have hunted horses using different techniques. By analyzing bones left in various Monte Castillo caves, these researchers have found that the Neanderthal inhabitants hunted individual horses and brought parts of the carcasses back to their living sites for further processing. Homo sapiens, on the other hand, hunted larger numbers of horses and butchered the meat in the field, hauling back only the choicest pieces. These differences might be due to the differing hunting abilities of Neanderthals and Homo sapiens, or it could be because there were more horses available to hunt, or it could just be due to a difference in food preference.
Nevertheless, these findings do tell us something
important: although no evidence of large-scale horse hunting exists in North America, horses in Iberia and elsewhere in Europe and Asia were commonly hunted, sometimes in very large numbers. Yet on these continents, horses did not become extinct.
There were plenty of horses in the region thirty thousand years ago. The northern Iberian coastal plain, the littoral, was then much more extensive than it is today, because so much of the world’s water was frozen. Remarkably, this littoral was biologically the westernmost part of the Eurasian steppe, which stretched all the way from the Atlantic Ocean to Siberia. The Iberian horses then living near Monte Castillo would have enjoyed complex grasslands that were somewhat similar to the grasslands enjoyed by Grant Zazula’s golden-coated Yukon horse. Perhaps they even ate an Iberian version of buttercups.
Equus thrived under these circumstances. The Messel horses were island animals, but during the Pleistocene, Eurasian horses had a grass-filled world at their command. It was as though this world had been made for them. It was during this time that the Vogelherd horse was carved, and during this time that one of the most astonishing and mysterious masterpieces of Pleistocene cave art was created.
This masterpiece, Chauvet Cave, shows horses playing a unique role as nervous observers of the wildlife around them. Chauvet sits high above a river valley, and thirty-thousand-plus years ago, this valley was rich with life. Few researchers or scientists are allowed to enter Chauvet, but there are many books and videos available, so that it’s possible to experience the cave’s art virtually.
The paintings show lions, reindeer, bison, bears, aurochs (a form of early cattle), a large panther-like cat, a megaceros (a large deer), ibexes, owls. The scope is immense, so much so that researchers at first doubted the authenticity of the cave. It didn’t seem possible that “primitive” people could have created such a panorama.
In this raucous panoply, the horses are essential. They are watchers. Many of the Chauvet animals are shown interacting with each other, walking in groups along ridgelines that run along the walls or fighting with each other or even preparing to mate—but not the horses. They stand quietly, some in small groups, some solitary. In one section, horses looking just like the gang of rogue “teenage” males Jason Ransom and I had seen in Wyoming stand in a row, side by side. One has his head down and mouth open, as if just looking up from his grazing. His wide eyes and pricked ears portray alarm. Another is just beginning to pay attention to some distant danger. Another is poised to flee. Below the horses, two rhinoceroses lock horns. Is this what frightened the four horses? Or were they startled by the prowling lions depicted nearby? Researchers have studied this particular panel in great depth and have discovered the order in which the animals were drawn. The grazing horse was added last, like the teller of the tale who just happened to be present.
The Horse Page 16