the limestone cavern in near-darkness, dodging shallow pools of water on the floor, until they reached a narrow corridor with a high, arched ceiling, like a cathedral vault. Only here did Ravidat raise his lamp, and the boys found their treasure. Covering the white walls was an explosion of life; images from the birth of our species, pulled back into view for the first time in 20,000 years.
First, they noticed coloured lines and strange, geometric signs. Then, moving the lamp around, they saw the animals. There were horses everywhere, golden with black manes, as well as black-and-red bulls, ibexes, and a bellowing, antlered stag. Herds climbed the walls and tumbled across the ceiling, some defined and multi-coloured, others ghostly, as if falling through fog. The boys didn’t understand the full significance of what they had found, but they knew it was special, and they celebrated with leaps and cries in the trembling light.
Lascaux cave (named for that nearby manor) now ranks as one of the most spectacular archaeological discoveries in history. It is just one of hundreds of caves in southern France and northern Spain decorated between 37,000 and 11,000 years ago by anatomically modern humans who first migrated into Europe from Africa around 45,000 years ago, during the last ice age. It’s a period called the Upper Palaeolithic, named for the stone tools in use at the time, and it seems to have hosted an explosion in human creativity. Rock art from around this time is known elsewhere, too – in Indonesia and Australia, for example – and the practice almost certainly originated even earlier, in Africa. But thanks to the complexity, exquisite preservation and sheer volume of its paintings and engravings – nearly 2,000 of them – Lascaux is one of the finest examples.
The artists here used plant-based brushes or swabs of hair, and a palette of iron and manganese minerals, kaolin clay and charcoal sticks, to cover corridors and chambers reaching 100 metres into the rock. Their creations provide a rare and hauntingly beautiful insight into the prehistoric human mind. Who were these early people? What did they care about, and what triggered them to create art? What was it, in effect, that made them human?
In the decades since the boys’ discovery, scholars have come up with a rich parade of answers to these questions. An early idea was that the mysterious figures were simply decoration, ‘art for art’s sake’, without any special meaning. Another suggestion was that the animals represented different clans, and that the paintings showed battles and alliances between them. Some experts thought that the paintings were intended as magical spells, to boost the success of hunting expeditions or ward off evil spirits. In the 1960s, scholars took a statistical approach, recording how different types of figures were distributed in the caves, and building theories around the patterns they saw, for example that the horses and bison symbolise male versus female identity.
Then there was Norbert Aujoulat, who perhaps came to know the paintings more intimately than anyone else. A cave enthusiast, he described himself as ‘an underground man’. He would disappear for days at a time on solitary excursions into the French mountains, and helped to discover dozens of subterranean chambers. But he never forgot the first time he saw Lascaux, one winter afternoon in 1970. Since its discovery the site had opened to the public and closed again: the breath exhaled by thousands of visitors per day, and the germs they tramped in, were damaging the precious paintings. Aujoulat, a twenty-four-year-old local student, joined a private tour guided by Jacques Marsal, one of the four friends who had discovered the cave three decades before.
To reach the paintings, Marsal led them down a slope through a series of stone-lined entrance halls and doors, built for security, which made Aujoulat feel as if they were approaching the sacred, inner space of a temple. The last door was made of heavy bronze and decorated with polished stones. Aujoulat spent only half an hour exploring the treasures beyond that door, but it was enough to set the course of his life. He was bewitched by the overwhelming sense of human presence inside the cave, powerful enough to stretch across so many thousands of years, and he set his sights on understanding how and why the paintings were created.
It was nearly two decades before Aujoulat was able to fulfil his dream. In 1988, as head of the French culture ministry’s Department of Parietal Art, he began a monumental, decade-long study of Lascaux cave, from the great bulls circling the ceiling of the entrance cavern to the dense, entangled engravings in a smaller chamber called the Apse. Whereas other scholars had focused on the art, Aujoulat approached Lascaux as a natural scientist, studying every aspect of the cave, from the geology of the limestone to the biology of the animals on the walls. He came to the conclusion that everyone else had missed a crucial dimension: time.
When he studied overlapping paintings where horses, aurochs and stags appeared together, he found that in every case the horses were painted first, then the aurochs, and then the stags. What’s more, the animals were always shown with features corresponding to specific times of year: the horses with bulky coats and long tails corresponding to the end of winter; the aurochs during the summer; and the stags with prominent antlers, characteristic of autumn. For each species, that was their mating season.
Aujoulat described his findings in a 2005 book called Lascaux: Movement, Space, and Time. By showing the fertility cycles of important animals, he argued, the cave should be understood as a spiritual sanctuary, intended to symbolise creation and the eternal rhythm of life. The cycle of creation represented by the paintings wasn’t just an earthly one, however, relating to animals and the weather. It extended to the entire cosmos.
The annual re-creation of life taking place in the Palaeolithic world was mirrored, of course, by the cycles of the stars: each season is marked by the passage of the sun as well as the appearance of characteristic constellations in the night sky. Aujoulat believed this was central to the artists’ vision; they were showing, he concluded, how biological and cosmic time were entwined. He compared the cave, with its overhanging walls and paintings that crossed the ceiling, to ‘the celestial vault’, and suggested that the animals weren’t being shown on the ground, but in the sky.
That could explain why the animals often appear to be floating – painted at all angles, without any ground-line, sometimes even with hanging hooves. If Aujoulat is right, Lascaux cave is as much about cosmology as it is about biology: rather than copying their immediate surroundings, the artists were synthesising all of the changes – on the Earth and in the sky – that defined their existence. It was an ode, if you like, to their universe, representing humanity’s first ideas about the nature of the cosmos and the origins of life.
Aujoulat was at the heart of the French academic establishment, and his work has been hugely influential. Even so, his ideas about the sky are rarely discussed; without direct evidence, archaeologists find it easier to accept the paintings as a celebration of nature than as a vision of the sky. There are some scholars, though, who think he didn’t go far enough, that rather than simply imagining animals in the sky, the artists of Lascaux were painting maps of the stars.
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In 1921, a French prehistorian called Marcel Baudouin came across a fossilised sponge that was shaped like a penis. The fossil, found in Beynes in north-central France, had a vibrant red patina which some ancient artist had chipped off in places to create a series of yellow, hoof-shaped dots. ‘It is the first time I have seen work like this!’ Baudouin wrote in excitement. In a paper called ‘The Great Bear and the Phallus of Heaven’, he argued that the pattern matches the northern constellation of Ursa Major (the Great Bear), even down to brighter stars being represented by larger dots.
It wasn’t possible to date the dots, but he concluded that they were carved in Palaeolithic or Neolithic times. Because of the Earth’s rotation, the stars of the northern hemisphere appear to circle around a stationary point in the sky directly above the North Pole (known today as the north celestial pole). Baudouin suggested that the fossil was intended to show this pole as a celestial penis, and that the carved dots represent nearby Ursa Major rotating around its shaft.
He was one of the first to see stars in prehistoric art;
