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Earliest Cultures
A culture is a way of thinking and living established by a group of people and transmitted from one generation to the next. It is, in other words, the basis of communal life. A culture’s collective values are expressed in its arts, writing, customs, and intellectual pursuits. The ability of a culture to express itself well, especially in writing, and to organize itself thoroughly, as a social, economic, and political entity, distinguishes it as a civilization. It is important to note, however, that some aspects of civilizations predate writing – monumental architecture and urban organization, for example. Furthermore, occasional civilizations, such as that of the Inca, never developed writing.
Just when the earliest cultures took form, and then subsequently transformed themselves into civilizations, is a matter of some conjecture among anthropologists, scientists who study humankind’s institutions and beliefs from the earliest times. The first historical evidence of a culture coming into being can be found in the artifacts of the earliest homo sapiens (“the one who knows”). About 35,000 years ago, the hominid species homo sapiens, which had come into being about 200,000 BCE, probably in Africa, began to assert itself in the forests and plains of Europe, gradually supplanting the Neanderthal homo erectus who had roamed the same areas for the previous hundred thousand years.
Both homo sapiens and homo erectus were toolmakers, as even our earliest ancestors seem to have been. They both cooked with fire, wore skins as clothing, and used tools. They evidently buried their dead in ritual ceremonies, which provide the earliest indications of religious beliefs and practices. These activities suggest the transmission of knowledge and patterns of social behavior from one generation to the next. But between 35,000-10,000 BCE – the last part of the Paleolithic, or Old Stone Age, when homo sapiens became more dominant and the Neanderthal line died out – the first objects that can be considered works of art began to appear, objects that seem to express the values and beliefs of the Paleolithic people. The Paleolithic period thus represents the very earliest cultural era.
Paleolithic Period
The Paleolithic period corresponds to the geological Pleistocene era, or Ice Age. Periodically, glaciers moved south over the European and Asian continents, forcing the inhabitants of the areas to move south, around the Mediterranean and into Africa. These people lived nomadic lives, following the animal herds (bison, mammoths, reindeer, and wild horses were abundant) on which they depended for food.
Cave Paintings
What is known of Paleolithic life derives largely from paintings found in cases, particularly in the Franco-Cantabrian area of southern France and northern Spain. The most famous prehistoric wall paintings are those at Lascaux, France, which were created between ca. 15,000-10,000 BCE. The Lascaux paintings are quite naturalistic. Many of the animals – bison, mammoths, reindeer, boars, wolves, and horses – gracefully jump, run, and romp, conveying a remarkable sense of animation. Painting is done in blacks, browns, reds, and yellows, with most of the pigments used of mineral oxides, with deeper black from burned bones.
How and why were these paintings created? The paintings at Lascaux and Vallon-Pont-d’Arc, in the Ardèche region of southern France, are located deep within the caves and are often very hard to reach. There is no evidence of human habitation where the paintings are located – instead, people seem to have lived at or near the entrances to the caves, where natural light was available. It is thought that the artists worked by the light of oil lamps. One theory holds that by creating these animals in paint, deep within the caves, the artists may have hoped that more animals would actually be born. Associated with this theory is the possibility that the superimposing, or layering, of animals was intended to show them mating.
Case Study: Chauvet
On a cold December afternoon in 1994, Jean-Marie Chauvet and two friends were exploring the caves in the steep cliffs along the Ardèche River gorge in southern France. After descending into a series of narrow passages, they entered a large chamber. There, beams from their headlamps lit up a group of drawings that would astonish the three exploders – and the world.
Since the late 19th century, we have known that prehistoric peoples, who lived before the time of recorded history, drew on the walls of cases. Twenty-seven such caves had already been discovered in the cliffs along the 17 miles of the Ardèche gorge. But the cave found by Chauvet and his friends transformed our thinking about prehistoric peoples. Where previously discovered cave paintings had appeared to modern eyes as childlike, this cave contained drawings comparable to those a contemporary artist might have done. We can only speculate that other comparable artworks were produced in prehistoric times but have not survived, perhaps because they were made of wood or other perishable materials. It is even possible that art may have been made earlier than 30,000 years ago, perhaps as people began to inhabit the Near East, between 90,000-100,000 years ago.
At first, during the Paleolithic era, the cultures of the world sustained themselves on game and wild plants. The cultures were small, scattered, and nomadic, though evidence suggests some interaction among the various groups. The cave paintings at Chauvet suggest that, as early as 30,000 years ago, the Ardèche gorge was a center of culture, a focal point of group living in which the values of a community find expression. There were others like it. In northern Spain, the first documented cave was discovered in 1879 at Altamira. In the Dordogne region of southern France to the west of the Ardèche, schoolchildren discovered the famous Lascaux cave in 1940 when their dog disappeared down a hole. And in 1991, along the French Mediterranean coast, a diver discovered the entrance to the beautifully decorated Cosquer Cave below the waterline near Marseille.
Ever since cave paintings were first discovered, scholars have marveled at the skill of the people who produced them, but we have been equally fascinated by their very existence. Why were these paintings made? Most scholars believe that they possessed some sort of agency – that is, they were created to exert some power or authority over the world of those who came into contact with them. Until recently, it was generally accepted that such works were associated with the hunt. Perhaps the hunter, seeking game in times of scarcity, hoped to conjure it up by depicting it on cave walls. Or perhaps such drawings were magic charms meant to ensure a successful hunt. But at Chauvet, fully 60 percent of the animals painted on its walls were never, or rarely, hunted – such animals as lions, rhinoceroses, bears, panthers, and woolly mammoths. One drawing depicts two rhinoceroses fighting horn-to=horn beneath four horses that appear to be looking on.
What role, then, did these drawings play in the daily lives of the people who created them? The caves may have served as some sort of ritual space. A ritual is a rite or ceremony habitually practiced by a group, often in religious or quasi-religious contexts. The caves, for instance, might be understood as gateways to the underworld and death, as symbols of the womb and birth, or as pathways to the world of drams experience in the dark of night, and rites connected with such passage might have been conducted in them. The general arrangement of the animals in the paintings by species or gender, often in distinct chambers of the caves, suggests to some that the paintings may have served as lunar calendars for predicting the seasonal migration of the animals. Whatever the case, surviving human footprints indicate that these caves were ritual gathering places and in some way were intended to serve human good.
At Chauvet, the use of color suggests that the paintings served some sacred or symbolic function. For instance, almost all of the paintings near the entrance to the cave are painted with natural red pigments derived from ores rich in iron oxide. Deeper in the cave, in areas more difficult to reach, the vast majority of the animals are painted in black pigments derived from ores rich in manganese dioxide. This shift in color appears to be intentional, but we can only guess at its meaning.
The skillfully drawn images at Chauvet raise even more important questions. The artists seem to have understood and practiced a kind of illusionism – that is, they were able to convey a sense of three-dimensional space on a two-dimensional surface. And yet these cave paintings, rendered over 30,000 years ago, predate other cave paintings by at least 10,000 years, and in some cases by 20,000 years.
Ritual and Religion
Unlike much of the art created in later eras, prehistoric art is thought to be related to ritual, linked with prayer to placate the powers of nature. In a form of sympathetic magic, power could be gained over elements of nature. For example, the theory that hunting rituals were performed in the caves to gain control over the animals depicted there is strongly supported not only by the paintings of spears on the animals, but also by actual spearheads found driven into some of the painted animals, which are shown to bleed as a result of their injuries. Thus, in order to ensure a successful hunt, the animal may have been killed in effigy before the hunt.
Art, religion, and ritual were bound together as images, words, and physical movement were combined to achieve success in the hunt. Religion and ritual were critically important for prehistoric cultures in which some measure of control over nature was necessary for survival.
Examples of Paleolithic Cave Art
1. Blombos, South Africa (70,000 BCE):
Oldest known art by humans
Archaeologists have made an incredible finding of a human drawing that dates back more than 70,000 years, making it the oldest human drawing ever discovered.
The finding, published in Nature, was made in Blombos Cave, which is located on the southern coast of South Africa. The research was led by Professor Christopher Henshilwood from the University of Bergen in Norway. It’s thought this cave was used temporarily by hunter-gatherers for stays of a week or two long ago.
The “drawing” consisted of a cross-hatched pattern made of six lines crossed with three lines on a silcrete flake. As such, it was described as a Stone Age “hashtag”. It looks like the pattern was originally much larger, as the lines abruptly end, and may have been more complex. The team thinks it was made with a pointed ochre crayon, with a tip 1 to 3 millimeters wide.
“It is definitely an abstract design and it almost certainly had some meaning to the maker,” Professor Henshilwood said. “It is also evidence of the ability of early humans to store information outside of the human brain.”
This particular cave plays host to a number of human artifacts dating back to between 70,000 and 100,000 years. This includes a “tool kit” with two shells inside, filled with an ochre-rich substance similar to a red paint, which proves our ancestors knew how to make paint up to 100,000 years ago.
In their paper, the researchers said this discovery “pre-dates the earliest previously known abstract and figurative drawings by at least 30,000 years.” They used chemical and microscopic analyses to confirm that it had been created by a human hand, demonstrating that Homo sapiens in southern Africa were behaviourally modern.
“The discovery… demonstrates that drawing was part of the behavioral repertoire of populations of early Homo sapiens in southern Africa,” the authors wrote. “It demonstrates their ability to apply similar graphic designs on various media using different techniques.”
Other discoveries at Blombos Cave had shown that humans there could produce paint (and use a brush to paint), engrave abstract designs, and create shell beads. This latest discovery was described as a “fourth leg to the table” by Professor Henshilwood, proving they had the ability to draw.
It’s a very exciting find, and one that gives us a fascinating insight into the capabilities of early humans. We may never know the exact meaning of this drawing but we do know it was, to someone at least, a very primitive work of art.
The world’s oldest known figurative artwork has been discovered in a cave in Indonesia — an endearing image of a warty pig. Archaeologists working on the site on the island of Sulawesi said the cave art was at least 45,500 years old. It is also thought to be the oldest surviving image of an animal. Painted using red ocher pigment, the animal appears to be observing a fight or social interaction between two other warty pigs. This region is home to many intriguing limestone caves where other discoveries have been made. Cave art depicting a hunting scene datingto 43,900 years ago was also found in Sulawesi in late 2019. The same team of archaeologistsin 2014 found human hand stencils, which were dated to 40,000 years ago.
Previously, the oldest known cave art was thought to have first appeared in Europe 40,000 years ago, showcasing abstract symbols. By 35,000 years ago, the art became more sophisticated, showing horses and other animals. These latest finds in Indonesia have challenged a long-standing belief that artistic expression — and the cognitive leap that may have accompanied it — began in Europe. The cave paintings in Indonesia are shedding new light on the early story of humanity. Study coauthor Maxime Aubert, an archaeologist and associate professor at Griffith University in Australia who specializes in the dating of rock art, said that view was “Eurocentric.” It’s now thought that the capability to create figurative art — that references the real world — either emerged before Homo sapiens migrated out of Africa and headed for Europe and Asia more than 60,000 years ago or that it emerged more than once as humans spread around the globe.
While abstract art has been found in Africa dating back to 77,000 years ago, no figurative art older than those found on sites in Europe and Indonesia has been discovered on the African continent, Aubert said. One reason for that could be because it’s particularly difficult to date cave art, Aubert explained. However, rock art made in limestone caves can sometimes be dated by measuring the radioactive decay of elements like uranium within the calcium carbonate deposits — sometime called cave popcorn — that form naturally on the cave surface. This was the case at the Leang Tedongnge site in southern Sulawesi, where a small cave popcorn had formed on the rear foot of the pig figure after it had been painted. The date indicates the scene had been painted prior to 45,500 years ago, Aubert said, and the cave art could be much older. A second Sulawesi warty pig image, from another cave in the region, was dated to at least 32,000 years ago using the same methodin the study that published in the journal Science Advances on Wednesday.
The team expects future research in eastern Indonesia will lead to the discovery of much older rock art and other archaeological evidence, dating back at least 65,000 years. “We have found and documented many rock art images in Sulawesi that still await scientific dating. We expect the early rock art of this island to yield even more significant discoveries,” said study coauthor and Indonesian rock art expert Adhi Agus Oktaviana, a doctoral student at Griffith University.
The researchers were confident the image was of a warty pig, which is shown in profile and filled in with irregular patterns of painted lines and dashes, because of the presence of spiky head crests and facial warts — the two conspicuous, hornlike protusions in the upper snout area. The pig painted on the ceiling of the cave measures 187 centimeters (6 feet) in length and 110 centimeters (3.6 feet) in height and is a red or mulberry color — the prehistoric artists used iron-rich rock as a pigment and could have used two colors. The researchers said there are three other pigs in the scene.
Warty pigs are still common in Indonesia and have since been domesticated. Not much is known about the people who made the art, Aubert said. Research has indicated that Homo sapiens arrived in Southeast Asia between 60,000 and 70,000 years ago. While the researchers said they are unable to definitively conclude that the artwork is the handiwork of cognitively modern humans, that was the most likely explanation. “Our species must have crossed through Wallacea by watercraft in order to reach Australia by at least 65,000 years ago,” said Aubert, referring to the region between continental Asia and Australia.“However, the Wallacean islands are poorly explored, and presently the earliest excavated archaeological evidence from this region is much younger in age.” Nonfigurative artwork has been attributed to other early humans, with rock art found in Spain believed to be the handiwork of Neanderthals — who overlapped with Homo sapiens for about 30,000 years before disappearing 40,000 years ago. However, this finding has been contested.
The depiction of the warty pig is also older than other types of prehistoric artwork found in Europe such as the “Lion-man,” a figurine of a lion-headed human, and a “Venus figurine” carved from mammoth ivory, both found in Germany and thought to be around 40,000 years old. It’s also more ancient than a recent find on another Indonesian island — an image of cattle that was found in a cave in Borneo. “This discovery underlines the remarkable antiquity of Indonesia’s rock art and its great significance for understanding the deep-time history of art and its role in humanity’s early story,” said study coauthor Adam Brumm, a professor at Griffith’s Australian Research Centre for Human Evolution.
At this very moment, you’re a participant in one of the things that makes us human: the telling and consumption of stories. It’s impossible to say when our species began telling each other stories—or when we first evolved the ability to use language to communicate not only simple, practical concepts but to share vivid accounts of events real or imagined. But by 43,900 years ago, people on the Indonesian island of Sulawesi had started painting some of their stories in images on cave walls.
A newly discovered painting in a remote cave depicts a hunting scene, and it’s the oldest story that has been recorded. And if Griffith University archaeologist Maxime Aubert and his colleagues are right, it could also be the first record of spiritual belief—and our first insight into what the makers of cave art were thinking.
Across a 4.5 meter (14.8 foot) section of rock wall, 3 meters (9.8 feet) above the floor of a hard-to-reach upper chamber of a site called Liang Bulu’Sipong 4, wild pigs and dwarf buffalo called anoa face off against a group of strangely tiny hunters in monochrome dark red. A dark red hand stencil adorns the left end of the mural, almost like an ancient artist’s signature. Through an opening in the northeast wall of the cave, sunlight spills in to illuminate the scene.
Liang Bulu’Sipong 4 is a living cave, still being reshaped by flowing water, and layers of rock have begun to grow over the painting in spots. The minerals that form those layers include small traces of uranium, which over time decays into thorium-230. Unlike the uranium, the thorium isn’t water-soluble and can only get into the rock via decay. By measuring the ratio of uranium-234 to thorium-230 in the rock, archaeologists can tell how recently the rock layer formed.
The deposits have been slowly growing over the hunting mural for at least 49,300 years, which means the painting itself may be even older than that. That makes the Liang Bulu’Sipong 4 mural the oldest record (that we know of) of an actual story. At first glance, it seems to suggest a game drive, in which people flush animals from cover and drive them toward a line of hunters with spears or other weapons. If Aubert and his colleagues are right about that, it means that somebody 44,000 years ago created a firsthand record of how they made a living.
But the oldest story ever recorded by human hands may be something more than a hunting record. “Some, or all, aspects of this imagery may not pertain to human experiences in the real world,” wrote Aubert and his colleagues. Up close, the tiny hunters don’t look quite human; many of them have strangely elongated faces, more like animal muzzles or snouts. One has a tail, and another appears to have a beak.
The figures could represent human hunters clad in skins or masks. Aubert and his colleagues, however, say they look more like therianthropes: human-animal hybrids that show up in cultures around the world, including in 15,500-year-old paintings in the Lascaux caves of France and a 40,000-year-old carved figure from Germany.
Whether they’re human, animal, or a bit of both, the hunters are facing prey animals of monstrous or mythological proportions. In real life, an anoa stands about 100cm (39.4 inches) tall, and an Indonesian wild pig stands only 60cm (23.6 inches) tall. On the wall of Liang Bulu’Sipong 4, though, the creatures loom many times larger than the hunters arrayed against them. It looks like a scene out of a legend, not a dry record of another day’s hunting.
And its presence suggests that Liang Bulu’Sipong 4 may have been a sacred, or at least important, place to the people who once lived in the area. Archaeologists found no trace of the usual debris of human life—stone tools, discarded bones, and cooking fires—anywhere in the cave or in the much larger chamber beneath it. That’s no wonder: Liang Bulu’Sipong 4 is set in a cliff 20 meters above the valley floor, and one doesn’t simply walk in.
“Accessing it requires climbing, and this is not an occupation site,” Aubert told Ars. “So people were going in there for another reason.”
Cave paintings in Malaga, Spain, could be the oldest yet found – and the first to have been created by Neanderthals.
Looking oddly akin to the DNA double helix, the images in fact depict the seals that the locals would have eaten, says José Luis Sanchidrián at the University of Cordoba, Spain. They have “no parallel in Palaeolithic art”, he adds. His team say that charcoal remains found beside six of the paintings – preserved in Spain’s Nerja caves – have been radiocarbon dated to between 43,500 and 42,300 years old.
That suggests the paintings may be substantially older than the 30,000-year-old Chauvet cave paintings in southeast France, thought to be the earliest example of Palaeolithic cave art.
The next step is to date the paint pigments. If they are confirmed as being of similar age, this raises the real possibility that the paintings were the handiwork of Neanderthals – an “academic bombshell”, says Sanchidrián, because all other cave paintings are thought to have been produced by modern humans.
Neanderthals are in the frame for the paintings since they are thought to have remained in the south and west of the Iberian peninsula until approximately 37,000 years ago – 5000 years after they had been replaced or assimilated by modern humans elsewhere in their European heartland.
Until recently, Neanderthals were thought to have been incapable of creating artistic works. That picture is changing thanks to the discovery of a number of decorated stone and shell objects – although no permanent cave art has previously been attributed to our extinct cousins.
Now some researchers think that Neanderthals had the same capabilities for symbolism, imagination and creativity as modern humans.
The finding “is potentially fascinating”, says Paul Pettitt at the University of Sheffield, UK. He cautions that the dating of cave art is fraught with potential problems, though, and says that clarification of the paintings’ age is vital.
“Even some sites we think we understand very well such as the Grotte Chauvet in France are very problematic in terms of how old they are,” says Pettitt.
If the age is confirmed, Pettitt suggests that the cave paintings could still have been the work of modern humans. “We can’t be absolutely sure that Homo sapiens were not down there in the south of Spain at this time,” he says.
Sanchidrián does not rule out the possibility that the paintings were made by early Homo sapiens but says that this theory is “much more hypothetical” than the idea that Neanderthals were behind them.
Who were the Neanderthals?
If you still think Neanderthals were dull-witted brutes, you simply aren’t woke. In 1856, laborers in a limestone quarry in Germany’s Neander Valley unearthed a skull cap that belonged to our closest evolutionary ancestor, and from the start we asserted our intellectual superiority over our thick-skulled cousins. To this day, the hunched-over, doltish caveman stereotype persists, an image that likely stems from Marcellin Boule’s reconstruction of a mostly complete, geriatric Neanderthal skeleton discovered 110 years ago in France. But we were wrong about Neanderthals’ wit, and over the years the pile of evidence has grown from a molehill and into to a mountain. And this week, Chris Standish, an archaeologist at the University of Southampton, and colleagues published a study further bolstering the case for Neanderthal smarts. Using a technique called uranium-thorium dating, they’ve shown that Neanderthals—not humans—are the creative force behind the world’s oldest cave paintings. Further, they say it’s solid evidence that creative expression and symbolic thinking weren’t exclusive to modern humans.
The international team of researchers took more than 60 samples of carbonate from three cave sites in Spain: La Pasiega, Maltravieso and Ardales. All of these caves contained ochre or black paintings of animals, geometric shapes, engravings and hand stencils. It was thought that modern humans tagged all the caves in Europe some 35,000 years, a point in time that marked a “creative explosion”—sometimes attributed to a brain mutation—that gave rise to art, spirituality and more complex social interactions. Recent technological advancements have made it easier to date cave art using the uranium-thorium method. It’s a technique that’s typically used to date calcium carbonate materials without damaging the target—although a small sample of the rock is required. Using this method, scientists can obtain a minimum or maximum age for the art they are testing. The date is determined by measuring the ratio of uranium to thorium, which changes over time as a result of radioactive decay. To get a minimum age, archaeologists scrape samples of calcite crusts—known as cave popcorn—that form over the top of drawings. If you get the age of the crusts, anything underneath them has got to be older. Their samples revealed that these paintings in Spain had to be at least 64,000 years old—roughly 20,000 years before modern humans arrived in Europe. This stretches back the timeline even further back than a similar study from 2011. “Our results show that the paintings we dated are, by far, the oldest known cave art in the world, and were created at least 20,000 years before modern humans arrived in Europe from Africa – therefore they must have been painted by Neanderthals,” Standish said in a news release. The team published its findings Thursday in the journal Science. We Didn’t Know Better Than Neanderthals Not only does this latest study push back the dateline for artistry in European caves, it suggests Neanderthals were symbolic thinkers. The hand stencils appear to have been deliberately placed in relation to natural features of the cave. Picking a location required planning, acquiring and mixing pigments and a light source to work in the cave. In other words, a Neanderthal didn’t just trip and leave a handprint; this was a very deliberate process. Cave paintings have been found across a large region and timeframe, which suggests a long tradition of artistry. In another study, published inScience Advances, scientists dated punctured and colored marine shells to a date significantly earlier than the arrival of modern humans in Europe. Found in a different Spainish cave, these shells were determined to be roughly 115,000 years old. The decorated artifacts were more proof of Neanderthals’ symbolic thinking abilities.
Perforated shells found in sediments in Cueva de los Aviones and date to between 115,000 and 120,000 years. (Credit: J. Zilhão) Now that we’ve absorbed these latest revelations, let’s take a moment to recap some of the things we now know about Neanderthal intelligence. In 1957, we discovered that Neanderthals buried their dead—fossilized pollen indicated they might have been buried with flowers. The eight adults and two who infants were discovered in northern Iraq also showed signs that their wounds had been tended to—another notch for Neanderthal intelligence. Other recent findings suggest Neanderthals were proficient tool-builders, may have communicated in song, wore jewelry and even dabbled in medicine and dentistry. They weren’t dimwits; after all, modern humans had sex with Neanderthals. With all we know about Neanderthal intelligence, the theory that modern humans outlived their forebears because we were more cunning sort of loses steam. Rather, we may have just been lucky. Last year, Stanford University evolutionary biologist Oren Kolodny published a paper in Nature Communications that concluded that population dynamics and favorable timing are the reason modern humans outlasted Neanderthals (i.e. it was luck, not skill). For a glimpse of what life would be like if Neanderthals were still around, those classic Geico “caveman” commercials might not be too far off the mark.
Prehistoric dots and crimson hand stencils on Spanish cave walls are now the world’s oldest known cave art, according to new dating results—perhaps the best evidence yet that Neanderthals were Earth’s first cave painters.
If that’s the case, the discovery narrows the cultural distance between us and Neanderthals—and fuels the argument, at least for one scientist, that the heavy-browed humans were not a separate species but only another race.
Of the 11 subterranean sites the team studied along northern Spain‘s Cantabrian Sea coast, the cave called El Castillo had the oldest paintings—the oldest being a simple red disk.
At more than 40,800 years old, “this is currently Europe’s oldest dated art by at least 4,000 years,” said the study’s lead author Alistair Pike, an archaeologist at the University of Bristol in the U.K.
If the new dates are correct, they also could make the El Castillo art the oldest known well-dated cave paintings in the world—a title previously held by France‘s Chauvet cave paintings, believed to be at least 37,000 years old.
Pike’s team teased out the new dates using a method that relies on known rates of decay in uranium—specifically uranium in calcium deposits that had formed over the paint. The mineral-based paint itself couldn’t be dated, because it contains neither uranium nor the carbon needed for radiocarbon dating.
In several cases, the Spanish artwork proved older than previously estimated based on indirect methods, such as stylistic comparisons with paintings at better dated sites, according to the study, published today by the journal Science.
The new dates raise the possibility that some of the paintings could have been made by Neanderthals, who are thought to have lived in Europe until about 30,000 or 40,000 years ago. Modern humans are believed to have also been in the area at the time, arriving about 41,500 years ago.
The findings wouldn’t be the first potential evidence of Neanderthal cave art.
“They dated some charcoal from the floor of the cave, and then they extrapolated it” to the paintings, Pike said.
“All that shows is that someone lit a fire in the cave 42,000 years ago, but they’ve linked it to the paintings. And we think that’s absolutely mad.”
Cave-art expert Michel Lorblanchet doesn’t think Pike’s proof is exactly ironclad either. More evidence, he said, would be needed to firmly establish that some of the Spanish cave paintings were products of Neanderthal minds.
“I am one of the people who are waiting for objective evidence of painting made by Neanderthal as well as Homo sapiens,” said Lorblanchet, a professor emeritus at the University of Toulouse in France.
“But to date a painting around 40,000 [years ago] does not prove that it was made by Neanderthals.”
Study leader Pike, though, pointed out that the new dates are minimum ages only.
“The calcite could have formed many thousands of years after the art was painted,” he said. “But I agree we will need to date more paintings to prove conclusively these were done by Neanderthals, and we are currently sampling more of the art to see … I think in the next few years we’ll actually prove this.”
Many scientists had long doubted whether Neanderthals were capable of producing symbolic art.
But that’s begun to change in recent years, thanks in part to the discovery of pigments, tiny art objects, and what might be body paint at Neanderthal sites, according to Paul Bahn, a cave art expert and a member of the Archaeological Institute of America.
“There remains a rump of blinkered scholars who still consider Neanderthals to be brutish savages, little better than animals, but fortunately they are a dwindling minority,” Bahn, who was not involved in the study, said in an email.
“I think almost all objective scholars now fully accept Neanderthal art.”
Study co-author João Zilhão goes a step further, suggesting that, if Neanderthals were responsible for some of the Spanish cave art, then perhaps there’s no real distinction between them and modern humans.
“It adds to the evidence … that Neanderthals were a European racial variant of Homo sapiens, not a distinct species,” said Zilhão, of the University of Barcelona.
At the very least, study leader Pike said, the new findings help narrow the distance between the cultural evolution of Neanderthals and modern humans.
“If you look at the [modern human] trajectory towards art, we find shell beads, bits of ochre, and ostrich shells carved with geometric designs from about 70,000 to 100,000 years ago” in Africa, he said.
Now, at European sites, “we see that Neanderthals are following the same trajectory. We see shell beads, carved sculptures, and geometric designs on bits of bone. And now we see what might be Neanderthal art.”
Though the oldest paintings in the study were stylistically simple disks and hand stencils, the caves also feature figurative art—for example, of horses and bison—that dates to after the fall of the Neanderthals.
“It is possible that dots and other non-figurative motifs were created by Neanderthals and [pictures of] animals by Homo sapiens,” said study team member and cave art expert Paul Pettitt of the U.K.’s University of Sheffield.
But “it needn’t imply any mental differences between the two. If you draw an animal and I draw several dots, there are no underlying differences in our cognition.”
Those supposed differences—and now these paintings—are at the heart of a debate over what it means to be human, or at least Homo sapiens.
“There’s a theory that it was an acceleration of cultural innovations that allowed humans to move into a territory that was occupied by Neanderthals,” study leader Pike said.
For modern humans, “cave paintings may have been a part of this cultural package, as were musical instruments and sculptures of animals and humans.”
Our species, some scientists have argued, experienced a “Great Leap Forward,” or “upper Paleolithic revolution,” some 35,000 years ago.
According to this idea, something—perhaps a genetic mutation or the development of language—triggered a technological and artistic explosion in Homo sapiens.
But, study co-author Zilhão said, the new evidence that Neanderthals could produce art “should lead scholars to abandon Great Leap Forward ideas.
“It suggests that a lengthy period of geometric or abstract art … in both Africa and Europe, preceded the emergence of figurative representations. If anything, it argues for a middle Paleolithic revolution, not an upper Paleolithic revolution.”
Twenty-six red-and-white handprints are plastered across the roof of the Leang Petta Kere cave in the Bantimurung subdistrict of Maros, South Sulawesi. At its center is a painting of a red boar, spanning half a meter in length. Apparently, the cave’s previous inhabitants expected a pretty big meal to keep everyone fed.
“This is a relic of the Middle Stone Age people, hunter-gatherers who lived here around 5,000 BCE,” says Lahab, an official from the Makassar Center for Cultural and Heritage Preservation, at the Leang-Leang Prehistoric Park.
In the native dialect, “leang” means “cave,” “petta” means “nobility,” and “kere” is “sacred”: so Noble, Sacred Cave.
Leang Petta Kere is one of about a hundred caves that have been identified by the Makassar Center for Cultural and Heritage Preservation as once being home to hunter-gatherers.
Visiting this ancient site, 45 meters above sea level and a 30-meter climb up a ladder, feels surreal, almost like looking through a window into the life of prehistoric men.
At the entrance to the cave forms a sort of antechamber, and it is here where the palm prints are found. “The palm was believed to repel, so that evil forces and wild animals wouldn’t enter,” Lahab says.
The prints themselves are a dirty white, like the rest of the cave walls, and are outlined by a red halo. It’s believed that the people who created the prints put their hands up against the wall and spit chewed-up foliage to create the outlines.
Some of the prints are red, supposedly created by dipping the hand in water tinted with the chewed-up leaves and stamping them on the wall.
“Researchers still don’t know what kind of leaves were used. In another cave, not in this region, black handprints have been found. Those are thought to have come from a later period than these ones,” Lahab says.
Some handprints have only four fingers and no thumb — “a sign that the person was mourning. They cut off one finger every time an elder of the group died,” Lahab says.
There are dozens of other smaller niches, all connected to one another and forming a network of resting places. Inside, the cave protected the prehistoric humans from the scorching sun. The temperature inside remains a pleasant 27 degrees Celsius throughout the day.
“This cave was occupied by several different groups. One group consisted of 30 to 35 people,” Lahab says.
Archaeologists have found artifacts such as flint blades and stone arrowheads. As hunter-gatherers, the cave people had a mountain of kitchen waste, a dump for the bones and shells of the animals they are. These fossilized remains are scattered at the mouth of a second cave, called Leang Pettae.
The latter was the first cave to be studied from among the hundred or so in the Maros Karst-Pangkep region. Here, five handprints were found along with a smaller image of a boar impaled with a spear. One of the five palms is thought to belong to a woman, Lahab says.
The exploration of the cave began in 1950 by Dutch archaeologists, who stumbled upon the caves that locals had been using to house their livestock.
Finding the caves today is easy. The region boasts the world’s longest limestone mountain range, or karst landscape, and has caves scattered everywhere.
The local residents have for years used these caves.
“When I was little the caves were a place to keep our cattle. Leang-Leang Prehistoric Park was once a rice field that also belonged to the locals. I’ve worked here as a caretaker since 1985, after it was designated a cultural heritage park,” says the 51-year-old Lahab.
A resident of Tompok Balang village in Bantimurung subdistrict, Lahab says the tradition of making handprints is still carried out by local residents, notably when the first beam of a new house is erected.
A priest dips his hand in rice flour and stamps his print on the beam, with the owner of the housefollowing suit.
“This tradition is called ambedak, or applying face powder. The handprint fades away quickly because they only use rice flour,” Lahab says.
Large chunks of limestone and andesite, a volcanic rock, are scattered irregularly around Leang-Leang Prehistoric Park. But a closer look reveals that they are laid out almost like the rocks of Stonehenge in England.
“Many foreign tourists from Britain and Australia are interested in the andesite stones. Since I was little, the stones have been laid out like this; no one dared move them,” Lahab says.
I gasped at my first glimpse of a cave painting: a crude red outline of a deer with one wild circle for an eye. Its iron pigments blazed under the lamplight. The illusion of a breastbone emerged, ingeniously, out of a hump in the limestone wall. After a while, a cave becomes a long black tunnel of sensory deprivation; the sight of this tender image jolted my breath back to life.
“Can you tell you’re in a sacred place?” asked Marcos Garcia Diez, the archaeologist who had agreed to show me some of the most breathtaking rock art ever created. “This cave is like a church and that’s why ancient people returned, returned, returned here for thousands of years.”
Jutting from the base of a mountain about 85km west of Bilbao, El Castillo is one of the world’s most celebrated rock art temples. When Homo sapiens first began their northward migration from Africa to Europe around 40,000 years ago, some joined the Neanderthals here in Cantabria, a region that is home to at least 40 painted caves, including El Castillo. So magnificent are the province’s primordial masterpieces that when Picasso visited, he reportedly declared, “We have learned nothing in 12,000 years.”
Unlike France, which has barred the public from entering its greatest cave art sites, Lascaux and Chauvet, Spain’s culture ministry has kept El Castillo open to the public, allowing up to 260 visitors per day. Officials even recently opened the nearby Altamira cave, the so-called “Sistine Chapel of rock art”, to five visitors per week through February 2015.
Incredibly, El Castillo’s deer painting, along with renderings of archetypal bison, horned ibex and extinct cows, were merely a prelude to my ultimate goal: to see, deep within the cave, an extraordinary smudge of calcite-encrusted red paint – by all accounts, a treasure found nowhere else on the globe.
Two years ago, Diez and a team of archaeologists discovered that the smudge – a red disc painted in a corridor known as the “Panel of Hands” – was much older than previously realised. In a 2012 study published in the journal Science, they revealed that the painting was at least 40,800 years old – making it the earliest-known cave painting on Earth.
Diez and his colleagues argued that the painting was so old, in fact, that it might predate modern man’s arrival in this part of the world, and thus may actually be the work of a Neanderthal. With more research, Diez thinks they will soon discover even older paintings.
The revelations did not come without controversy, but it wasn’t the methodology that experts quarrelled with. Many agree that the standard practice of radiocarbon dating is limited at best; it applies only to charcoal works and loses reliability after about 35,000 years. To go back further, into the age of Neanderthals, Diez and his colleagues borrowed a technique from military science for dating the radioactive uranium that appears in calcite. They tested formations of the mineral that had grown atop paintings in 11 caves, assuming that whatever its age, the underlying paint had to be at least as old, and possibly much older. (The method proved so successful that other researchers used it to make another major discovery in October 2014: a 39,900-year-old handprint in Indonesia that is now considered the world’s second-oldest painting.)
What did cause contention was the suggestion that Neanderthals may have been responsible for the art – a divisive theory that threatens to disrupt decades of scholarship on the origins of human creativity. Scientists have long claimed that our thicker-skulled ancestors were not intelligent enough to make art. But today, a growing number of scholars argues that the characterization of Neanderthals as boneheaded beasts is an outdated, sapian-centric construction – even a kind of bigotry. As Gregory Curtis described in his book The Cave Painters, some view Neanderthals as “the very first victims of imperialism”.
None of this seemed of particular interest to Diez, however, as he led me deeper into the cave, guiding me through narrow verges and up muddy inclines. He thinks of himself as a “dirt archaeologist” – more interested in exploration than debate.
Yet Diez still enjoys asking impossible questions about the meaning of cave art. “Why do you think they painted so many of these?” he said, squatting beneath a rough but unmistakable sketch of a bison. Before I could answer, he explained how some ethnographers theorize that ancient hunters painted these prized sources of meat with the shamanistic belief that pictures could summon the animals. This “hunting magic” theory works a little like voodoo: representation as actualisation.
While Diez forged ahead, I stopped at the Panel of Hands, the site of dozens of handprints stencilled in ochre. I held my palm up a few inches from one of the outlines. I wanted to press down upon it, as if to gain access to some ancestor who, 1,600 generations ago, also laid a hand against this stone.
When Diez turned back, he flashed his light on my hand, still mid-air. “That. What you’re doing right now,” he said. “That, I think, is the reason for the paintings.” As I looked at my palm still hovering over the handprint, I realised he was right.
It was the innate human impulse to connect to something bigger than oneself. The wall was more than a canvas, it was a threshold – “a being”, Diez said. In this view, the cave is a kind of Palaeolithic church, where paintings are scriptures and creativity is the measure of divinity.
“We’re close,” Diez said as we continued down the rocky chute. By now, it had taken us nearly three hours to walk – and often crawl – through the 1km-long labyrinth, and I sensed that we were circling back near the entrance.
Sure enough, a minute later, the hollow widened and Diez flashed his light onto a low, shadowy wall. There it was: the oldest-known painting in the world. Nothing more than a fist-sized red splotch.
“Is it everything you expected?” he asked.
I fumbled for an answer, but only more questions came to mind: Was this the work of history’s first artist? Did it represent the moment mankind transcended the animals?
The marking struck me as a kind of vanishing point: the furthest visible moment on the plane of human history. Yet as I stood before it, all of time seemed to melt into illusion, and I began to understand why we so often describe the ineffable with inadequacies like “spiritual” or “transcendent”. Sometimes we must simply surrender to the unfamiliar, to the limitations of our knowledge, perception and language.
The Chauvet Cave (also known as the Chauvet-Pont-d’Arc Cave) is a Palaeolithic cave situated near Vallon-Pont-d’Arc in the Ardèche region of southern France that houses impeccably preserved, exquisite examples of prehistoric art. Now reliably dated to between c. 33,000 and c. 30,000 years ago, the numerous and diverse animals that dot the interior walls of the cave – both painted and engraved – show such high artistic quality that they were initially thought to have been closer in age to the similarly stunning, but much younger art in caves such as the Lascaux Cave. Its age and artistry have made us reconsider the story of art as well as the capabilities of these humans. The cave has been granted UNESCO World Heritage status.
On Sunday, 18 December 1994 CE, Jean-Marie Chauvet and his two friends Éliette Brunel and Christian Hillaire were following their passion for speleology (the study of caves) and exploring an area on the left bank of the river Ardèche, close to the Pont-d’Arc. A light airflow emanating from a hole alerted them to the possible existence of underground caverns. While making their way through the passages they then discovered some small traces of red ochre, before being blown away by the full magnitude of the hundreds of paintings and engravings.
The Chauvet Cave was occupied by humans during at least two periods, the first from c. 37,500 years ago to c. 33,500 years ago, and the second from c. 32,000 to c. 27,000 years ago. Around 80% of the registered dates fall around the 32,000 years old mark – which corresponds with the average age of the paintings and engravings and sits snugly in the Aurignacian period. The remaining signs of occupation are from around 27,000 years ago, which ties in with the succeeding Gravettian period. From at least around 21,000 years ago onwards until its rediscovery in 1994 CE, the Chauvet Cave was completely sealed off to visitors due to the entrance having collapsed.
The artists of this cave thus belonged to the Aurignacian culture, the first culture of the Late- or Upper Palaeolithic in Europe which began when anatomically modern humans first arrived in Europe around 40,000 years ago and lasted until around 28,000 years ago. They were hunter-gatherers whose prey was made up predominantly of reindeer, horses, bison and aurochs, and faced competition from predators such as cave bears and cave lions, panthers, and wolves. Aurignacians used a wide range of organic tools, made personal ornaments, figurative art, and even musical instruments, and are thus seen to show the full package of what we call fully modern behavior.
Hearths have been found within the cave, so it is clear that daily activities of these groups of people took place here, too. Interestingly, the hearths had an additional, non-domestic use – they were also used for producing charcoal, which was part of the artists’ toolkit.
The artists of Chauvet Cave had torches at their disposal to cast dim, flickering shadows in the pitch-black darkness within the cave. The natural relief of the walls would have been continually highlighted and contrasted, which must have been impressive to witness, especially when combined with the animal shapes used to decorate them. To paint, black paint made from charcoal or manganese dioxide and red paint made from haematite was applied onto the rock surfaces, either by brushes; fingers; using bits of charcoal as pencils; or stump-drawing, which is sticking paint on the wall and then spreading it with your hand or a piece of hide. Paint could also be sprayed onto the walls through tubes, or, for the adventurous, directly from the mouth, across stencils such as hands placed on the wall. Chauvet stands out because here, the walls were often prepared for the imminent paint jobs by scraping them clean first, which really made the paintings pop.
There are hundreds of paintings and engravings in the Chauvet Cave, ranging from geometric forms of red dots on the walls, to handprints, to more than 420 animal representations. In the majority are animals that were not hunted, such as lions, rhinoceroses, and bears, which is interesting because from the succeeding Gravettian period onward preferences tended to be reversed, with the focus lying on prey animals. Chauvet also stands out for its use of sophisticated techniques such as wall scraping, stump-drawing, and depicting perspective, which are otherwise not as abundantly represented in prehistoric cave art. Although this is a tricky topic, it is thought these Palaeolithic people might have had some sort of shamanistic religion in which the art played a role, perhaps with a dose of hunting magic added to it (where the depicted animals were directly influenced by acting on their images).
The First Part of the Cave
Some of the first paintings one might bump into after having entered the cave are three cave bears painted in red in a small recess. The artist has cleverly used the relief of the wall to form the shoulders of the biggest bear, as well as stump-drawing the muzzle, the outlines of the head and the forequarters, giving the composition more depth. This first part of the cave, which is characterized by the color red, is also home to a couple of clusters of large red dots, located in a side chamber, made by dipping the palm of the right hand in liquid red paint and then pushing it against the cave wall. A bit further into the first section of the cave there are some mysterious images, again in red, with geometric bits, that are hard to identify; they could be symbolic signs, or even representations of animals (perhaps a butterfly or a bird with its wings spread?). A large panel of red paintings lies beyond, extending for more than twelve meters, which features mostly handprints, geometric signs, and animals such as lions and rhinos.
The Second Section
A chamber that has no art adorning its walls paves the way into the second section of the cave, where the paintings are now predominantly black rather than red, and engravings step into the limelight, too.
The Hillaire Chamber, situated here, is rife with engravings decorating large hanging rocks; one of them is a remarkable long-eared owl which is shown with its head facing the front while its body is seen from the back, which eternalizes the species’ cool 180-degree rotation party trick.
Further on, more horses jump out, this time drawn in charcoal on the so-called Panel of the Horses. About 20 animals are seen in a unique, naturalistic scene which is rare in Palaeolithic art, and that makes up one of the major pieces of the Chauvet Cave. Taking center stage are four horses’ heads, but the real eye-catchers are two rhinoceroses that stand face to face, horns crossed, confronting each other in just the way male rhinos actually fight in the wild.
A Reindeer Panel and a structure made up of a cave bear skull – decorated with charcoal marks and placed on top of a large limestone block, its hollow eye-sockets peering out into the darkness – further highlight these Palaeolithic humans’ versatility.
Exploring the End Chamber
When advancing further into the cave, things just keep getting more spectacular. The end chamber is so richly decorated you hardly know where to look. The first standout piece is the Panel of the Rhinos, drawn with charcoal on rock, featuring nine lions, one reindeer, and a staggering 17 rhinos (who are otherwise very rare in Palaeolithic wall art). The composition has a spatial perspective to it, achieved through leaving gaps in strategic places and decreasing the horn sizes of the rhinos towards the back.
To the right of the central recess, the incredible Panel of the Lions makes up another unique scene in Palaeolithic art; the main scene shows a pride of 16 lions (indicated mostly by just their heads) chasing a group of seven bison. The lions’ tense expressions, their poses, and the fact that male lions have joined the females – which happens in nature – leaves us with a snapshot of a hunt in progress. The techniques set this piece apart even further; a scraped surface; shading achieved by stump-drawing; areas left blank to create depth; and enhanced outlines by scraping all serve to make the animals almost leap from the wall.
Some more mysterious shapes than these easily identifiable animals are also present in the end chamber, though. The Panel of the Sorcerer has both black drawings and engravings, and features animals such as lions, a horse, two mammoths and a musk ox, but also an odd shape known as the ‘Sorcerer’. It seems to be a composite creature made up of a woman’s lower body crowned with the upper body and horned head of a black bison. The last few animals in this chamber are a red rhinoceros, a sketchy rhinoceros, and a mammoth (drawn in charcoal and engraved).
Taking the harsh lesson of the Lascaux Cave to heart, which was heavily damaged by the carbon dioxide produced by its countless visitors, the Chauvet Cave is sealed off to the public. It continues to be studied by an interdisciplinary team, originally led by Jean Clottes, and since 2001 CE by Jean-Michel Geneste. A watchful eye is kept out for any alarming signs. To soothe the frantic interests of people fascinated by our artistic ancestors – again following Lascaux’ example – a replica (known as the Pont-d’Arc Cavern) has been built close to the original cave.
In 1940, four teenage boys stumbled, almost literally, from German-occupied France into the Paleolithic age. As the story goes – and there are many versions of it – they had been taking a walk in the woods near the town of Montignac when the dog accompanying them suddenly disappeared. A quick search revealed that their animal companion had fallen into a hole in the ground, so – in the spirit of Tintin, with whom they were probably familiar – the boys made the perilous 15-metre descent to find it. They found the dog and much more, especially on return visits illuminated with paraffin lamps. The hole led to a cave, the walls and ceilings of which were covered with brightly coloured paintings of animals unknown to the 20th-century Dordogne – bison, aurochs and lions. One of the boys later reported that, stunned and elated, they began to dart around the cave like “a band of savages doing a war dance”. Another recalled that the painted animals in the flickering light of the boys’ lamps seemed to be moving. “We were completely crazy,” yet another said, although the build-up of carbon dioxide in a poorly ventilated cave may have had something to do with that.
This was the famous and touristically magnetic Lascaux cave, which eventually had to be closed to visitors lest their exhalations spoil the artwork. Today, almost a century later, we know that Lascaux is part of a global phenomenon, originally referred to as “decorated caves”. They have been found on every continent except Antarctica – at least 350 of them in Europe alone, thanks to the cave-rich Pyrenees – with the most recent discoveries in Borneo (2018) andCroatia (April 2019). Uncannily, given the distances that separate them, all are adorned with similar decorations: handprints or stencils of human hands, abstract designs containing dots and crosshatched lines, and large animals, both carnivores and herbivores, most of them now extinct. Not all of these images appear in each of the decorated caves – some feature only handprints or megafauna. Scholars of paleoarcheology infer that the paintings were made by our distant ancestors, although the caves contain no depictions of humans doing any kind of painting.
There are human-like creatures, though, or what some archeologists cautiously call “humanoids”, referring to the bipedal stick figures that can sometimes be found on the margins of the panels containing animal shapes. The non-human animals are painted with almost supernatural attention to facial and muscular detail, but, no doubt to the disappointment of tourists, the humanoids painted on cave walls have no faces.
This struck me with unexpected force, no doubt because of my own particular historical situation, almost 20,000 years after the creation of the cave art in question. In about 2002 we had entered the age of “selfies,” in which everyone seemed fascinated by their electronic self-portraits – clothed or unclothed, made-up or natural, partying or pensive – and determined to propagate them as widely as possible. Then, in 2016, the US acquired a president of whom the kindest thing that can be said is that he is a narcissist. This is a sloppily defined psychological condition, I admit, but fitting for a man so infatuated with his own image that he decorated the walls of his golf clubswith fake Time magazine covers featuring himself. On top of all this, we have been served an eviction notice from our own planet: the polar regions are turning into meltwater. The residents of the southern hemisphere are pouring northward toward climates more hospitable to crops. In July, the temperature in Paris reached a record-breaking 42.6C.
You could say that my sudden obsession with cave art was a pallid version of the boys’ descent from Nazi-dominated France into the Lascaux cave. Articles in the New York Times urged distressed readers to take refuge in “self-care” measures such as meditation, nature walks and massages, but none of that appealed to me. Instead, I took intermittent breaks from what we presumed to call “the Resistance” by throwing myself down the rabbit hole of paleoarcheological scholarship. In my case, it was not only a matter of escape. I found myself exhilarated by our comparatively ego-free ancestors, who went to great lengths, and depths, to create some of the world’s most breathtaking art – and didn’t even bother to sign their names.
Cave art had a profound effect on its 20th-century viewers, including the young discoverers of Lascaux, at least one of whom camped at the hole leading to the cave over the winter of 1940-41 to protect it from vandals, and perhaps Germans. More illustrious visitors had similar reactions. In 1928, the artist and critic Amédée Ozenfant wrote of the art in the Les Eyzies caves, “Ah, those hands! Those silhouettes of hands, spread out and stencilled on an ochre ground! Go and see them. I promise you the most intense emotion you have ever experienced.” He credited the Paleolithic artists with inspiring modern art, and to a certain degree, they did. Jackson Pollock honoured them by leaving handprints along the top edge of at least two of his paintings. Pablo Picasso reportedly visited the famous Altamira cave before fleeing Spain in 1934, and emerged saying: “Beyond Altamira, all is decadence.”
Of course, cave art also inspired the question raised by all truly arresting art: “What does it mean?” Who was its intended audience, and what were they supposed to derive from it? The boy discoverers of Lascaux took their questions to one of their schoolmasters, who roped in Henri Breuil, a priest familiar enough with all things prehistoric to be known as “the pope of prehistory”. Unsurprisingly, he offered a “magico-religious” interpretation, with the prefix “magico” serving as a slur to distinguish Paleolithic beliefs, whatever they may have been, from the reigning monotheism of the modern world. More practically, he proposed that the painted animals were meant to magically attract the actual animals they represented, the better for humans to hunt and eat them.
Unfortunately for this theory, it turns out that the animals on cave walls were not the kinds that the artists usually dined on. The creators of the Lascaux art, for example, ate reindeer, not the much more formidable herbivores pictured in the cave, which would have been difficult for humans armed with flint-tipped spears to bring down without being trampled. Today, many scholars answer the question of meaning with what amounts to a shrug: “We may never know.”
If sheer curiosity, of the kind that drove the Lascaux discoverers, isn’t enough to motivate a search for better answers, there is a moral parable reaching out to us from the cave at Lascaux. Shortly after its discovery, the one Jewish boy in the group was apprehended and sent, along with his parents, to a detention centre that served as a stop on the way to Buchenwald. Miraculously, he was rescued by the French Red Cross, emerging from captivity as perhaps the only person on earth who had witnessed both the hellscape of 20-century fascism and the artistic remnants of the Paleolithic age. As we know from the archeological record, the latter was a time of relative peace among humans. No doubt there were homicides and tensions between and within human bands, but it would be at least another 10,000 years before the invention of war as an organised collective activity. The cave art suggests that humans once had better ways to spend their time.
If they were humans; and the worldwide gallery of known cave art offers so few stick figures or bipeds of any kind that we cannot be entirely sure. If the Paleolithic cave painters could create such perfectly naturalistic animals, why not give us a glimpse of the painters themselves? Almost as strange as the absence of human images in caves is the low level of scientific interest in their absence. In his book What Is Paleolithic Art?, the world-class paleoarcheologist Jean Clottes devotes only a couple of pages to the issue, concluding that: “The essential role played by animals evidently explains the small number of representations of human beings. In the Paleolithic world, humans were not at the centre of the stage.” A paper published, oddly enough, by the US Centres for Disease Control and Prevention, expresses puzzlement over the omission of naturalistic depictions of humans, attributing it to Paleolithic people’s “inexplicable fascination with wildlife” (not that there were any non-wild animals around at the time).
The marginality of human figures in cave paintings suggests that, at least from a human point of view, the central drama of the Paleolithic went on between the various megafauna – carnivores and large herbivores. So depleted of megafauna is our own world that it is hard to imagine how thick on the ground large mammals once were. Even the herbivores could be dangerous for humans, if mythology offers any clues: think of the buffalo demon killed by the Hindu goddess Durga, or of the Cretan half-man, half-bull Minotaur, who could only be subdued by confining him to a labyrinth, which was, incidentally, a kind of cave. Just as potentially edible herbivores such as aurochs (giant, now-extinct cattle) could be dangerous, death-dealing carnivores could be inadvertently helpful to humans and their human-like kin, for example, by leaving their half-devoured prey behind for humans to finish off. The Paleolithic landscape offered a lot of large animals to watch, and plenty of reasons to keep a close eye on them. Some could be eaten – after, for example, being corralled into a trap by a band of humans; many others would readily eat humans.
Yet despite the tricky and life-threatening relationship between Paleolithic humans and the megafauna that comprised so much of their environment, 20th-century scholars tended to claim cave art as evidence of an unalloyed triumph for our species. It was a “great spiritual symbol”, one famed art historian, himself an escapee from Nazism, proclaimed, of a time when “man had just emerged from a purely zoological existence, when instead of being dominated by animals, he began to dominate them”. But the stick figures found in caves such as Lascaux and Chauvet do not radiate triumph. By the standards of our own time, they are excessively self-effacing and, compared to the animals portrayed around them, pathetically weak. If these faceless creatures were actually grinning in triumph, we would, of course, have no way of knowing it.
We are left with one tenuous clue as to the cave artists’ sense of their status in the Paleolithic universe. While archeologists tended to solemnise prehistoric art as “magico-religious” or “shamanic,” today’s more secular viewers sometimes detect a vein of sheer silliness. For example, shifting to another time and painting surface, India’s Mesolithic rock art portrays few human stick figures; those that are portrayed have been described by modern viewers as “comical,” “animalised” and “grotesque”. Or consider the famed “birdman” image at Lascaux, in which a stick figure with a long, skinny erection falls backwards at the approach of a bison. As Joseph Campbell described it, operating from within the magico-religious paradigm: “A large bison bull, eviscerated by a spear that has transfixed its anus and emerged through its sexual organ, stands before a prostrate man. The latter (the only crudely drawn figure, and the only human figure in the cave) is rapt in a shamanistic trance. He wears a bird mask; his phallus, erect, is pointing at the pierced bull; a throwing stick lies on the ground at his feet; and beside him stands a wand or staff, bearing on its tip the image of a bird. And then, behind this prostrate shaman, is a large rhinoceros, apparently defecating as it walks away.”
Take out the words “shaman” and “shamanistic” and you have a description of a crude – very crude – interaction of a humanoid with two much larger and more powerful animals. Is he, the humanoid, in a trance or just momentarily overcome by the strength and beauty of the other animals? And what qualifies him as a shaman anyway? The bird motif, which paleoanthropologists, drawing on studies of extant Siberian cultures, automatically associated with shamanism? Similarly, a bipedal figure with a stag’s head, found in the Trois Frères cave in France, is awarded shamanic status, making him or her a kind of priest, although, objectively speaking, they might as well be wearing a party hat. As Judith Thurman wrote in the essay that inspired Werner Herzog’s film The Cave of Forgotten Dreams, “Paleolithic artists, despite their penchant for naturalism, rarely chose to depict human beings, and then did so with a crudeness that smacks of mockery.”
But who are they mocking, other than themselves and, by extension, their distant descendants, ourselves? Of course, our reactions to Paleolithic art may bear no connection to the intentions or feelings of the artists. Yet there are reasons to believe that Paleolithic people had a sense of humour not all that dissimilar from our own. After all, we do seem to share an aesthetic sensibility with them, as evidenced by modern reactions to the gorgeous Paleolithic depictions of animals. As for possible jokes, we have a geologist’s 2018 report of a series of fossilised footprints found in New Mexico. They are the prints of a giant sloth, with much smaller human footprints inside them, suggesting that the humans were deliberately matching the sloth’s stride and following it from a close distance. Practice for hunting? Or, as one science writer for The Atlantic suggested, is there “something almost playful” about the superimposed footprints, suggesting “a bunch of teenage kids harassing the sloths for kicks”?
Then there is the mystery of the exploding Venuses, where we once again encounter the thin line between the religious and the ridiculous. In the 1920s, in what is now the Czech Republic, archeologists discovered the site of a Paleolithic ceramics workshop that seemed to specialise in carefully crafted little figures of animals and, intriguingly, of fat women with huge breasts and buttocks (although, consistent with the fashion of the times, no faces). These were the “Venuses,” originally judged to be either “fertility symbols” or examples of Paleolithic pornography.
To the consternation of generations of researchers, the figures consisted almost entirely of fragments. Shoddy craftsmanship, perhaps? An overheated kiln? Then, in 1989, an ingenious team of archeologists figured out that the clay used to make the figurines had been deliberately treated so that it would explode when tossed into a fire, creating what an art historian called a loud – and one would think, dangerous – display of “Paleolithic pyrotechnics.” This, the Washington Post’s account concluded ominously, is “the earliest evidence that man created imagery only to destroy it”.
Or we could look at the behaviour of extant stone age people, which is by no means a reliable guide to that of our distant ancestors, but may contain clues as to their comical abilities. Evolutionary psychiatrists point out that anthropologists contacting previously isolated peoples such as 19th-century Indigenous Australians found them joking in ways comprehensible even to anthropologists. Furthermore, anthropologists report that many of the remaining hunter-gatherers are “fiercely egalitarian”, deploying humour to subdue the ego of anyone who gets out of line: “Yes, when a young man kills much meat he comes to think of himself as a chief or a big man, and he thinks of the rest of us as his servants or inferiors,” one Kalahari hunter told the anthropologist Richard B Lee in 1968. “We can’t accept this. We refuse one who boasts, for someday his pride will make him kill somebody. So we always speak of his meat as worthless. This way we cool his heart and make him gentle.”
Some lucky hunters don’t wait to be ridiculed, choosing instead to disparage the meat they have acquired as soon as they arrive back at camp. In the context of a close-knit human group, self-mockery can be self-protective.
In the Paleolithic age, humans were probably less concerned about the opinions of other humans than with the actions and intentions of the far more numerous megafauna around them. Would the herd of bison stop at a certain watering hole? Would lions show up to attack them? Would it be safe for humans to grab at whatever scraps of bison were left over from the lions’ meal? The vein of silliness that seems to run through Paleolithic art may grow out of an accurate perception of humans’ place in the world. Our ancestors occupied a lowly spot in the food chain, at least compared to the megafauna, but at the same time they were capable of understanding and depicting how lowly it was. They knew they were meat, and they also seemed to know that they knew they were meat – meat that could think. And that, if you think about it long enough, is almost funny.
Paleolithic people were definitely capable of depicting more realistic humans than stick figures – human figures with faces, muscles and curves formed by pregnancy or fat. Tiles found on the floor of the La Marche cave in France are etched with distinctive faces, some topped with caps, and have been dated to 14-15,000 years ago. A solemn, oddly triangular, female face carved in ivory was found in late 19th-century France and recently dated to about 24,000 years ago. Then there are the above mentioned “Venus” figurines found scattered about Eurasia from about the same time. But all these are small and were apparently meant to be carried around, like amulets, perhaps – as cave paintings obviously could not be. Cave paintings stay in their caves.
What is it about caves? The attraction of caves as art studios and galleries does not stem from the fact that they were convenient for the artists. In fact, there is no evidence of continuous human habitation in the decorated caves, and certainly none in the deepest, hardest-to-access crannies reserved for the most spectacular animal paintings. Cave artists are not to be confused with “cavemen”.
Nor do we need to posit any special human affinity for caves, since the art they contain came down to us through a simple process of natural selection: outdoor art, such as figurines and painted rocks, is exposed to the elements and unlikely to last for tens of thousands of years. Paleolithic people seem to have painted all kinds of surfaces, including leather derived from animals, as well as their own bodies and faces, with the same kinds of ochre they used on cave walls. The difference is that the paintings on cave walls were well enough protected from rain and wind and climate change to survive for tens of millennia. If there was something special about caves, it was that they are ideal storage lockers. “Caves,” as paleoarcheologist April Nowell puts it, “are funny little microcosms that protect paint.”
If the painters of Lascaux were aware of the preservative properties of caves, did they anticipate future visits to the same site, either by themselves or others? Before the intrusion of civilisation into their territories, hunter-gatherers were “non-sedentary” people – perpetual wanderers. They moved to follow seasonal animal migrations and the ripening of fruits, probably even to escape from the human faeces that inevitably piled up around their campsites. These smaller migrations, reinforced by intense and oscillating climate change in the Horn of Africa, added up to the prolonged exodus from that continent to the Arabian peninsula and hence to the rest of the globe. With so much churning and relocating going on, it’s possible that Paleolithic people could conceive of returning to a decorated cave or, in an even greater leap of the imagination, foresee visits by others like themselves. If so, the cave art should be thought of as a sort of hard drive, and the paintings as information – and not only “Here are some of the animals you will encounter around here,” but also “Here we are, creatures like yourselves, and this is what we know.”
Multiple visits by different groups of humans, perhaps over long periods of time, could explain the strange fact that, as the intrepid French boys observed, the animals painted on cave walls seem to be moving. There is nothing supernatural at work here. Look closely, and you see that the animal figures are usually composed of superimposed lines, suggesting that new arrivals in the cave painted over the lines that were already there, more or less like children learning to write the letters of the alphabet. So the cave was not merely a museum. It was an art school where people learned to paint from those who had come before them, and went on to apply their skills to the next suitable cave they came across. In the process, and with some help from flickering lights, they created animation. The movement of bands of people across the landscape led to the apparent movement of animals on the cave walls. As humans painted over older artwork, moved on, and painted again, over tens of thousands of years, cave art – or, in the absence of caves, rock art – became a global meme.
There is something else about caves. Not only were they storage spaces for precious artwork, they were also gathering places for humans, possibly up to 100 at a time in some of the larger chambers. To paleoanthropologists, especially those leaning toward magico-religious explanations, such spaces inevitably suggest rituals, making the decorated cave a kind of cathedral within which humans communed with a higher power. Visual art may have been only one part of the uplifting spectacle; recently, much attention has been paid to the acoustic properties of decorated caves and how they may have generated awe-inspiring reverberant sounds. People sang, chanted or drummed, stared at the lifelike animals around them, and perhaps got high: the cave as an ideal venue for a rave. Or maybe they took, say, psychedelic mushrooms they found growing wild, and then painted the animals, a possibility suggested by a few modern reports from San people in southern Africa, who dance themselves into a trance state before getting down to work.
Each decoration of a new cave, or redecoration of an old one, required the collective effort of tens or possibly scores of people. Twentieth-century archeologists liked to imagine they were seeing the work of especially talented individuals – artists or shamans. But as Gregory Curtis points out in his book The Cave Painters, it took a crowd to decorate a cave – people to inspect the cave walls for cracks and protuberances suggestive of megafauna shapes, people to haul logs into the cave to construct the scaffolding from which the artists worked, people to mix the ochre paint, and still others to provide the workers with food and water. Careful analysis of the handprints found in so many caves reveals that the participants included women and men, adults and children. If cave art had a function other than preserving information and enhancing ecstatic rituals, it was to teach the value of cooperation, which – to the point of self-sacrifice – was essential for both communal hunting and collective defence.
In his book Sapiens, Yuval Noah Harari emphasises the importance of collective effort in the evolution of modern humans. Individual skill and courage helped, but so did the willingness to stand with one’s band: not to scatter when a dangerous animal approached, not to climb a tree and leave the baby behind. Maybe, in the ever-challenging context of an animal-dominated planet, the demand for human solidarity so far exceeded the need for individual recognition that, at least in artistic representation, humans didn’t need faces.
All this cave painting, migrating and repainting came to an end roughly 12,000 years ago, with what has been applauded as the “Neolithic revolution”. Lacking pack animals and perhaps tired of walking, humans began to settle down in villages, and eventually walled cities; they invented agriculture and domesticated many of the wild animals whose ancestors had figured so prominently in cave art. They learned to weave, brew beer, smelt ore and craft ever-sharper blades.
But whatever comforts sedentism brought came at a terrible price: property, in the form of stored grain and edible herds, segmented societies into classes – a process anthropologists prudently term “social stratification”– and seduced humans into warfare. War led to the institution of slavery, especially for the women of the defeated side (defeated males were usually slaughtered) and stamped the entire female gender with the stigma attached to concubines and domestic servants. Men did better, or at least a few of them, with the most outstanding commanders rising to the status of kings and eventually emperors. Wherever sedentism and agriculture took hold, from China to South and Central America, coercion by the powerful replaced cooperation among equals. In Jared Diamond’s blunt assessment, the Neolithic revolution was “the worst mistake in the history of the human race”.
At least it gave us faces. Starting with the implacable “mother goddesses” of the Neolithic Middle East, and moving on to the sudden proliferation of kings and heroes in the Bronze Age, the emergence of human faces seems to mark a characterological change – from the solidaristic ethos of small, migrating bands to what we now know as narcissism. Kings and occasionally their consorts were the first to enjoy the new marks of personal superiority – crowns, jewellery, masses of slaves, and the arrogance that went along with such things. Over the centuries, narcissism spread downward to the bourgeoisie, who, in 17th-century Europe, were beginning to write memoirs and commission their own portraits. In our own time, anyone who can afford a smartphone can propagate their own image, publish their most fleeting thoughts on social media and burnish their unique brand. Narcissism has been democratised and is available, at least in crumb-sized morsels, to us all.
So what do we need decorated caves for any more? One disturbing possible use for them has arisen in just the last decade or so – as shelters to hide out in until the apocalypse blows over. With the seas rising, the weather turning into a series of psychostorms, and the world’s poor becoming ever more restive, the super-rich are buying up abandoned nuclear silos and converting them into doomsday bunkers that can house up to a dozen families, plus guards and servants, at a time. These are fake caves of course, but they are wondrously outfitted – with swimming pools, gyms, shooting ranges, “outdoor” cafes – and decorated with precious artworks and huge LED screens displaying what remains of the outside world.
But it’s the Paleolithic caves we need to return to, and not just because they are still capable of inspiring transcendent experiences and connecting us with the long-lost natural world. We should be drawn back to them for the message they have reliably preserved for more than 10,000 generations. Granted, it was not intended for us, this message, nor could its authors have imagined such perverse and self-destructive descendants as we have become. But it’s in our hands now, still illegible unless we push back hard against the artificial dividing line between history and prehistory, hieroglyphs and petroglyphs, between the “primitive” and the “advanced.” This will take all of our skills and knowledge – from art history to uranium-thorium dating techniques to best practices for international cooperation. But it will be worth the effort, because our Paleolithic ancestors, with their faceless humanoids and capacity for silliness, seem to have known something we strain to imagine.
They knew where they stood in the scheme of things, which was not very high, and this seems to have made them laugh. I strongly suspect that we will not survive the mass extinction we have prepared for ourselves unless we too finally get the joke.
1. We recently learned that the earliest cave drawings were made by Neanderthals, not humans. How does this change our definition of humanity and what it means to be human?
2. What can we learn about Paleolithic people from the art they left behind?
3. What role or purpose do you think art had in the lives of Paleolithic tribes?
4. What similarities do you see in the art from all the different caves?
5. What makes the art in Liang Bulu’Sipong the oldest story ever recorded?
6. How is the art in Lascaux different than that of the others?