Lascaux Caves

Imagine climbing from brilliant sunlight into a dark, damp hole. You don’t dare look back at the elders who have prompted you to go inside. You have no idea what awaits you. Your entire life is lived under the sun, moon and stars and shallow caves, and you’ve only heard whispers of the what lays in deep places. You know this is a sacred place, that there are mysteries no one can explain inside. You climb in, leaving the light of shining day and all you are familiar with behind you. The opening gets smaller, and soon you can’t stand up. It gets more narrow until you have to shimmy along on your stomach, keeping your right shoulder against the wall. You repeat the singsong rhyme to yourself that you have sang since childhood. Growing up you didn’t know what it meant, you just sang it along with your mother and your siblings and the elders at night at the fire, one of many songs. But now the true meaning becomes clear- it is a map. A spoken map, remembered through the generations as a song that entertains, and then guides literally through the dark, and then serves to remind you of the lessons you learned there. Here in the underworld there are creatures, the spirits and essences of animals and ancestors and the world itself. Finally the constrictive passage opens before you, and see the smallest glow in the distance, and can just make out the cavern in front of you. You crouch down, and with shaking fingers struggle to light the wick in the lamp you have painstakingly carried with you. The bowl of oil sloshes precariously, and at last it is lit. The light grows and flickers, blinding in the dark, and you look up and almost duck to the floor. A giant herd of red deer, aurochs and mammoths charge around you. You are in the middle of a stampede, and with every flicker of the flame the herd moves. They move over you like a river, and you are standing on the rocky bottom under invisible water. Finally you remember your purpose, and start to walk forward. Moving only enhances the sense of confusion of where you are in space. You can almost hear the herds moving in your mind, even though the only sounds around you are dripping and the faint echoing of your own footsteps. Or is that your footsteps? Pausing, the faint thumping does not stop with your feet. Fear shoots through you, but the only way is to go forward. Leaving without the mark is unthinkable. Never had anyone entered the cave and left without the mark on their forehead, and you had not gotten that yet. At last you climb over a huge, damp stone, and an opening which is lighter than the rest of the darkness shines ahead. You move toward it as quickly as you can on the uneven ground, spears which hang from the ceiling and grow from the floor like terrible cold trees guiding your path. You reach the opening and look through, your heart beating so loudly you can hardly tell sounds from your chest from the beating sound coming from within the next chamber of the cave.

Ever since their discovery in September of 1940, the Lascaux caves have inspired many questions. Why were they painted? How? What were they used for? These are questions we will never fully have the answers to. The above is fiction, of course. I was inspired to imagine what it might have been like to make your way through these caves as ancient person after listening to lectures by experts Meg Conkey and Tim Gill. There is no way to go back into the past and find out how these caves were used, and what the Archaic Humans or Neanderthals thought and believed about them. What we do know is based on evidence found in the archaeological record. The Lascaux caves, found in France, do not show signs of habitation inside. The ceilings are not black with soot, yet there are paintings far outside of normal human reach and in places that would be invisible without someone lighting the pictures up and then viewing them from a distance.

ILLUSTRATION BY JACK UNRUH, NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC


We know that they had hand held oil lamps with wicks, and that many people spent considerable time creating these images. These caves provide us with a window in the deep, deep past. Other humans, long gone, once stood here and painted things on the walls things that mattered to them. The Lascaux caves were discovered by teenagers who’s dog fell into a hole one afternoon in September in 1940. The artwork is 15,000-17,000 years old and depict animals that were alive in Europe at that time, as well as some mythical creatures. There is a main cavern that is covered in around 1500 engravings and 600 paintings.

See https://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/lascaux-cave-paintings-discovered for more information about visiting.

Recent work suggests that the way that the pictures were painted, with animals overlapping each other, was on purpose. Layering the images like this would create a sense of movement in flickering firelight. When viewed how the ancients would have viewed them, with a flickering candle, the images seem to run and move much like a flip book or a Kinetoscope.

Demonstration of cave painting animation:

https://youtu.be/25opuS7hMZM
https://youtu.be/UM7gRh41pBA
https://youtu.be/cF4M2iIP7bg

Some of the most ancient artwork that has survived to the modern era is inside caves. Not because ancient people only drew pictures in caves, but because they were protected from the elements. Caves provide a stable, dark, chemically unique environment that allows contents to remain inside without wearing away as quickly as they would in open air sites. Paintings and carvings that were on rocks exposed to the air and weather would have worn away within a few decades, but paintings protected in dark, slow changing caves have lasted tens of thousands of years. The Lascaux caves are not the only ancient decorated caves. Below I have listed link where you can view some of the most spectacular caves around the globe.

Lascaux Caves, France
https://www.bradshawfoundation.com/lascaux/

Escoural Cave, Portugal
http://www.prehistour.eu/carp-guide/escoural-cave


Cueva de los Aviones, Spain- Art that predates anatomically modern humans, and was likely created by Neanderthals!
https://www.nationalgeographic.com/news/2018/02/neanderthals-cave-art-humans-evolution-science/


Cave of Swimmers, Golf Kebir, Egypt- from when the Sahara was a Savannah full of lakes and vegetation

http://www.bradshawfoundation.com/africa/gilf_kebir_cave_of_swimmers/index.php


Multiple sites, Australia

https://www.australiangeographic.com.au/topics/history-culture/2016/03/top-7-aboriginal-rock-art-sites/


South Africa
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/rock-art-in-southern-africa-2005-01/


Special thanks to experts Doctor Meg Conkey and Doctor Tim Gill, for their very informative lectures that inspired this post and provided much information for it.


Further Sources

https://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/lascaux-cave-paintings-discovered