JOURNALISTS around the world went into a frenzy in January last year when French cave researcher Jean-Marie Chauvet unveiled a remarkable collection of prehistoric rock art. Chauvet and his friends had discovered the paintings just a few weeks earlier in a cavern at Vallon-Pont-d’Arc in southern Ardèche. Some 300 paintings and at least as many engravings depict about a dozen species of animal, several never before seen in rock art. The paintings are made of ochre, charcoal and haematite.
In their clamour to understand the importance of the find, the reporters turned their spotlight on France’s leading rock art expert Jean Clottes, an archaeologist with the Ministry of Culture. How old were the paintings? And who could have created such exquisite works of art?
At that time, the pigment had not been radiocarbon dated, so Clottes relied on his long experience of studying cave art to estimate the age of Chauvet’s find. Based on the style of the graceful animals in the pictures, he told journalists they were probably between 18 000 and 20 000 years old (This Week, 28 January 1995, p 12).
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He was way off the mark. A few months later, to his amazement, carbon dating put some of the paintings at 31 000 years old, making them the oldest in the world.
“It’s not possible,” Clottes told the Gif-sur-Yvette laboratory where the analysis had been conducted. But the dates were verified by two other laboratories and the Chauvet cave, as it became known, was propelled once more into the headlines.
Even before a full-scale study of the site has begun, it has already altered thinking about the origins of human creative expression. The long-held theory that art developed gradually over thousands of years from a primitive, childlike style to more complex forms was already crumbling-the Chauvet cave put an end to that idea once and for all. But the antiquity of some of the paintings has rekindled the debate about who the earliest artists were and why creativity evolved in the first place. Prehistorians are far from reaching a consensus on either question, admits Margaret Conkey, professor of anthropology at the University of California at Berkeley.
The Chauvet collection is dominated by depictions of dangerous and relatively rare animals of the period. They include a rhinoceros, felines, mammoths and bears, which have all been seen elsewhere, but three animals unique in Stone Age cave art-a panther, hyena and owl-also feature. Michel Lorblanchet, an archaeologist at the CNRS, France’s national research agency, says the sheer beauty and sophistication of the work “provides brilliant confirmation” that dating cave art on the basis of stylistic cues is obsolete. Many of the animals are seen in perspective, with contours scraped into the surface for emphasis, others were filled by spreading paint with a hand or tool to obtain differences in shade and create relief. “The people who did this were great artists,” says Clottes.
Chauvet’s oldest paintings push back the first recorded appearance of cave art by 4000 years. Previously, the oldest reliably dated examples were the 27 000-year-old handprints in the underwater Cosquer cave near Marseille.
Most researchers still think the first artists were descendants of the modern humans who arrived in Europe some 40 000 years ago, having migrated from Africa, but the antiquity of the Chauvet paintings increases the chances that Neanderthals created them.
Research published in May provides firm evidence that Neanderthals-a dead-end branch of the hominid ancestral tree-lived side by side with modern humans until at least 34 000 years ago at Arcy-sur-Cure in central France. And they were present in Spain as recently as 27 000 years ago.
Personal ornaments-pierced teeth and ivory rings-were found with the Neanderthal remains at Arcy-sur-Cure. The researchers speculate that such objects may have been copied, traded or even stolen from the Neanderthals’ modern human neighbours.
However, the Chauvet findings provide ammunition for archaeologists who refuse to rule out the possibility that Neanderthals had a cultural industry of their own. “It’s not impossible that the Chauvet cave was painted by Neanderthals,” says Randall White, an archaeologist at New York University and a leading defender of Neanderthals, who he believes don’t deserve their reputation as intellectually slow and culturally void.
But many see the idea that Neanderthals decorated the Chauvet cave as far-fetched. Steven Mithen, a lecturer in archaeology at the University of Reading, rejects the possibility outright. “They were physically but not mentally capable,” he says. The Chauvet cave, he adds, is testimony that modern humans, with their more highly evolved brains, were capable of the type of symbolic thought and sophisticated visual representation that was beyond Neanderthals.
Mithen believes that the brains of Neanderthals were divided into distinct, isolated cognitive domains. He calls this “domain-specific intelligence”. Neanderthals had language and social skills, he says, and they could produce things like stone tools and infer meaning about the migration of animals from hoof prints. But structural limitations in their brains meant that they were unable to bring these elements together as an artistic representation. “The Neanderthal mind was like a Romanesque cathedral with different chapels of intelligence and thick walls in between,” he says. “The modern mind is more like a Gothic cathedral with sound and light flowing freely.”
Culture clash
Mithen believes modern humans emerged after a final redesign of the brain, resulting in a “big bang” of cultural advances that started 40 000 years ago in Europe with the production of objects such as beads, pendants, statuettes, paintings and engravings. Rock art appears to have been most prolific in Europe, after this cultural big bang, but Mithen and others point out that some wall engravings in Australia may date back around 40 000 years and painted slabs found in southern Africa date to about 27 500 years ago.
Clive Gamble, a prehistorian at the University of Southampton, calls Mithen’s ideas “interesting and challenging” but contends that cognitive changes resulted from changes in the social lives of early humans, rather than the other way round. He says a “social revolution” changed the way people organised their relationships. Around the time Chauvet was painted, modern humans were migrating to far-flung regions of the globe and developing extended social networks. “They had to store memories symbolically because of these more complex relationships,” says Gamble. Neanderthals, on the other hand, had more local, face-to-face contact and as a consequence they never created art.
Other prehistorians are more sceptical of Mithen’s proposal that rewiring in the brain allowed humans to begin decorating walls and making beads. Conkey believes something else about the way people were living provided the catalyst which led to image making. She doesn’t deny that the brains of Neanderthals and early humans were different, but says the rewiring theory fails to explain why visual representations were absent in the Middle East for so long, even though modern humans appeared there as early as 90 000 years ago.
So why did humans develop a creative impulse? At the beginning of this century scholars believed cave art was “art for art’s sake”. During the next half century, however, the study of Upper Palaeolithic art was ruled by Henri Breuil, the eminent French prehistorian. He compared prehistoric cave paintings with Australian aboriginal art and concluded that both were a form of hunting magic.
Our hunter-gatherer ancestors often chose to make dangerous journeys into the bowels of the Earth to paint or engrave rock walls. At Niaux cave in France’s Ariège region, for example, the earliest painted symbols are on walls half a kilometre from the entrance along a dark, narrow passage, with a series of underground lakes along the way and the eerie echoes of dripping water.
The art dates over a long period, ranging from 11 500 to 10 500 years ago during the Magdalenian period of the Upper Palaeolithic. Three quarters of the cave’s 104 animal figures are in the Salon Noir, a cathedral-like sanctuary with ceilings reaching more than 50 metres high. Half the animals are bison, each with a different expression depending on the way the eyes, nostrils and antlers are drawn. In such a setting Breuil’s theory of magic seems to make perfect sense.
This interpretation was challenged in the 1960s by André Leroi-Gourhan, who worked at the Sorbonne in Paris, and Arlette Laming-Emperaire, from the CNRS. They put forward a “structuralist” theory drenched in sexual symbolism which sought meaning in the locations of the different images inside the caves. Today’s French prehistorians, such as Clottes and Lorblanchet, agree that the caves were certainly used as secret, spiritual sanctuaries, but they are loathe to go further. According to Conkey, French scientists are currently in the midst of a “frenzy of descriptive data collection”, as if trying to compensate for past efforts to explain rock art in more fanciful terms.
Other prehistorians are more willing to speculate. White sees clues to prehistoric humans’ artistic motivation in their production of ornamental objects, which seems to have taken off around 35 000 years ago. The smooth texture of polished soapstone beads and pendants and seashells carved from ivory, says White, evokes a deeper meaning of sexual fluids, warmth and sensuality. “There is a spiritual context of the materials inherent to the objects,” he says. “It’s not about art but the broader transformation of material symbols by humans.”
White suggests that such items could have been used for trade and as indicators of social identity. He has made an extensive study of a site in Sungar, Russia, where the bodies of two children and an adult dating from 28 000 years ago were unearthed. All three were decorated with thousands of ivory beads, which would have taken more than 10 000 hours to produce. The boy also wore a belt made from the teeth of 60 foxes. White concludes that by this time humans had begun to filter the world through symbols and use objects as social signals, including the elevation of some individuals above others.
Religious leanings
Cave art, he says, was an extension of this. Hunter-gatherers attached a religious significance to their paintings. “They were deeply motivated to go underground, perhaps transferring the spirit of the animal to the wall, or else [in the belief that] it was already there,” says White. He adds that paintings were inventions like any other tool or object.
Mithen also sees religious symbolism in cave art. He points to the half human, half bison figure at Chauvet as an early example of humans ascribing their own attributes to a deity. Such anthropomorphic thinking, says Mithen, is one of the most spectacular examples of the fluidity of the modern mind. Images like this may signal the emergence of mythology or religion, he says.
Another theory about the meaning of cave art has been put forward by the South African archaeologist David Lewis-Williams (“Stone Age psychedelia”, 8 June 1991, p 30). He contends that southern African prehistoric rock art is shamanistic, depicting hallucinations. Shamans in hunter-gatherer societies are believed to be able to control the movement of animals. Lewis-Williams is now working on applying the theory to European Upper Palaeolithic rock art.
The chances of finding a single interpretation for diverse forms of prehistoric cave art are slim. Conkey suggests the paintings could mean several things at once, from hunting magic to shamanism to boredom with their diet. “They weren’t just putting the menu on the wall,” she says. The main food staples of the period, such as ibex and deer, are not the animals most commonly found on cave walls in France. Other scholars imagine the drawings played an important role in passing on information about the hunting environment.
At Chauvet, the work is just beginning. But the likelihood of finding clues about the artists is greater than ever. The French government recently announced that the cave will never be opened to the public, so Chauvet will be spared the fate of many other caves which have been trampled by hundreds of thousands of visitors. The floors of such sites hold valuable information about how caves were used, so Chauvet offers a valuable chance to study the context in which these images were painted. “Until now it has been like studying Van Gogh by just looking at the sunflowers without doing a contextual analysis of the society in which he lived,” says Gamble.