the possibility that both are by the same hand. Who knows whether that small limestone plaque from Serrières could not have been a sketch for the wall painting. Or was the drawing of La Genière, on the other hand, just a souvenir of a pilgrimage.”
Did the artist who painted the wall at Font-de-Gaume carry his preliminary sketch all the way to La Genière? Or did a prehistoric tourist so greatly admire the mural that he, or she, bought or stole the sketch in order to take it home?
Both thoughts are surprising. Who could have imagined such artistic concern during the Stone Age?
Alas, regardless of ancient aesthetics, we are here confronted by a fake. Professor Viret of Lyon observed suspiciously: “On ne saurait pas manquer d’être frappé de la profondeur et de la régularité du sillon de la gravure.” In other words, authentic Stone Age engravings almost always are drawn softly, delicately, whereas the beast at La Genière had been delineated with deep regular strokes.
Professor Viret, troubled by this discrepancy, submitted the limestone bison for laboratory analysis, and beneath ultraviolet light one could see that the fluorescence of the line sharply differed from the fluorescence of the surface. This meant the engraving must be recent. Quite recent. And here, too, just as in the case of Charles Dawson, although the faker cannot be positively identified, circumstantial evidence does point to somebody: one of the workmen at La Genière. It’s been learned that he was familiar with the Font-de-Gaume wall painting, and he is known to have made an engraving of a deer in the same style. The deer is not as good, probably because he didn’t have a model. Forgers are better at copying than at creating.
So, regrettably, the limestone plaque cannot persuade us that our ancestors would travel 300 kilometers to view the latest chef d’oeuvre.
However, when sifting evidence one must be careful. Consider the engravings of mammoths discovered at Les Eyzies. In 1885 these were denounced as fakes. Modern investigators, though, have doubts about the nineteenth-century doubts. For example, certain anatomical peculiarities of a mammoth—which are clearly represented at Les Eyzies—were unknown even to scientists in 1885.
And the Altamira paintings were ridiculed for a long time, mostly because nineteenth-century scholars were able to perceive a “slightly mediocre air of modernity.”
All of which should remind us that one can be not only too gullible, but too skeptical.
Besides, as the twentieth-century scholar Luis Pericot-Garcia has remarked: “Without aesthetic ability, the experience gained by apprenticeship in a school, and the background of a tradition, no artist would spontaneously paint a bison such as those at Altamira.”
Herbert Kühn, who examined the work at Lascaux, discovered that the figures had been outlined with knives before they were painted, and these outlines first had been delineated with a brush—perhaps made from the plume of a snipe—because such fragile drawing could not be rendered any other way. Parenthetically it may be noted that in German the snipe’s plume is die Malerfeder, the artist’s feather, and when equipped with a bone handle it becomes a perfectly adequate little brush. The Lascaux artwork, however, does not seem to have been brushed on; almost certainly the paint was squirted, very much as we spray-paint automobiles. The surface was prepared with oil and fat, then powdered colors were blown onto the sticky background through bone tubes. Now this is quite a sophisticated technique, which clearly supports Pericot-Garcia’s theory. There must indeed have been schools.
Ice Age pigments are genuine oil colors, not much different from those used by artists today, says Kühn. “The ochres would have been pounded fine in mortars, and in many caves ochre-crayons have been found. . . .”
On a rock bench at Altamira lay a supply of crayons, sharpened and neatly arranged, resembling women’s lipstick displayed on a cosmetics counter, just as the artist left them 12,000 years ago. Or perhaps long before that. Say 15,000. The mere existence of these crayons seems astonishing, yet still more so is the arrangement—the fact that it was not a disorderly collection but a coherent spectrum from which the artist could select whatever he thought appropriate. It is this evidence of planning which truly surprises us because we assume that those spear-carrying fur-clad hunters did not shrewdly organize their thoughts, did not quite bring their minds into focus. Not unless it concerned survival. Organizing for a mammoth hunt, yes. But one man, a cave muralist, reflectively choosing his palette?
And if you still think Ice Age artists lacked sophistication, it might be observed that a grasshopper incised on a bone at Les Trois Frères was portrayed with such fidelity that the insect’s species has been determined.
They seem to have been modern enough in other ways. One engraved bone depicts a man who is either watching or following a voluptuous nude woman—a picture that bluntly points out, with little equivocation, how you and I happen to be here.
Professor Magín Berenguer suggests that man entered the world of art by way of these adipose Venuses, where the entire expressive force is concentrated on fecundity. Then, through his art, man established the immense distance which separates him from all other created things.
So be it.
Lungfish to shrew to ape to man. For better or worse that was the sequence; at least it’s a sequence acceptable to many anthropologists. As always, however, there are creepers of dissent pushing in every direction.
According to Richard Leakey, who has continued the work started by his father: “Early man was a hunter, but I think the concept of aggressiveness—the killer-ape syndrome—is wrong. I am quite sure that the willingness of modern aggressive man to kill his own kind is a very recent cultural development. . . .”
Says George Schaller: “Man is a primate by inheritance but a carnivore by profession. . . .”
David Pilbeam: “I have grown increasingly skeptical of the view that hominids differentiated as weapon-wielding savanna bipeds. I am as inclined to think that changes in a predominantly vegetarian diet provided the initial impetus. Also I believe that too little emphasis has been placed on the role of language and communication. . . .”
F. Clark Howell: “We still do not know the source of the hominids, but it is possible that their origin may lie between seven and fifteen million years ago, and perhaps not only in Africa. . . .”
Von Koenigswald: “I definitely believe man’s earliest ancestors came from Asia. . . .”
Or you may choose to go along with paleontologist Bjurn Kurten, who thinks man did not evolve from the ape but vice versa. He considers it possible to draw a direct line of ancestry from ourselves to a small-jawed animal called Propliopithecus that lived thirty or forty million years ago.
If none of this sounds appealing you can always return to the comfortable certitude of Archbishop Ussher.
The ultimate question, though, toward which all inquiries bend, and which carries a hint of menace, is not where or when or why we came to be as we are, but how the future will unfold.
IN 1828 A PEASANT WHO WAS plowing on the Italian estate of Lucien Bonaparte, Napoleon’s brother, crashed through the roof of an Etruscan burial vault. A bailiff was ordered to investigate, and what he saw underground promptly caused Lucien to start raking the countryside for more tombs. Hundreds were found and looted, yielding thousands of painted dishes, statuettes, jewels, rings,
