Around two hundred and eighty caves with several thousand painted scenes have been discovered in Europe so far, with the oldest ones, such as those found in El Conde, La Vina, and Cueto de la Mina in Spain, provoking the greatest admiration. The largest of them is the Rouffignac Cave in France, whose network of ten kilometers of corridors and chambers was explored and painted by Magdalenian people fourteen thousand years ago.
Today, we can confidently say that the painted caves were not used for living, they were not tombs for people or animals, nor do they depict hunting scenes.
Realism and Abstraction
The drawings that follow the natural contours, protrusions, and ledges are usually grouped into scenes. They are spread throughout numerous corridors and cave chambers, with some caves revealing the first images only at depths greater than two kilometers from the entrance.
Since animals are the most common motif in these scenes, the early explorers believed that Paleolithic hunters depicted hunting scenes on the cave walls. More meticulous observers discovered that the paintings were made with great precision and the animals were often depicted in motion.
Research, however, has shown that the animals rarely depicted were those that Paleolithic hunters hunted to feed their families (wild cow, antelope, rabbit, and boar), while lions, leopards, hyenas, cave bears, rhinos, owls, and wildcats are often found.
Interestingly, the same animals regularly appear in exact locations, regardless of the cave’s age or geographic location. Art historians have classified them into three basic groups. The first group consists of the so-called “four noble animals”: bison, horse, aurochs, and mammoth, found in the large central gallery spaces. The second group consists of ibex and giant deer (megaceros), depicted regularly near the entrance to the cave shrine. The third group includes “terrifying and dangerous animals” such as bears, rhinos, lions, leopards, and other beasts painted in the deepest and darkest passages, corridors, and chambers.
Almost all of these European animals became extinct at the end During the last Ice Age, many were lost, but some were preserved and continued to exist through cave art scenes.
Techniques for painting caves included drawing, painting, relief, and sculpture. The surface where the painting was to be applied would first be cleaned by smoothing, then the outlines of the image would be crafted in relief, and only after that, they would be filled with color. White, yellow, brown, red, and black colors were used, obtained from minerals and mineral soils like ochre, hematite, manganese oxide, and charcoal. Heating the mineral soils produced a range of shades. Painters used brushes made of hair, feathers, or fur, as well as pieces of mineral colors sharpened like school chalk. Color was also blown onto cave walls using hollow bones or handprints and fingerprints were left. Scenes were not painted directly on the final surface; instead, sketches were first made on stone slabs, overhangs, or bones. Only in Parpalló, Spain, have 5857 such relief slabs been found, along with numerous similar sketches. Discoveries have been made across Europe.
The most famous Paleolithic sculptures have been found in the French cave Tuc d’Audoubert (13,000 years old). At a depth of one thousand meters, in a remote part of the cave, there are clay-made sculptures of a male (63 cm tall), female (61 cm), and a young bison (12 cm). The sculptures were smoothed by hands, and details like eyes, beard, and nostrils were refined with a bone spatula. Interestingly, the Tuc d’Audoubert cave is connected through underground galleries of the Volp river with the neighboring, also painted, cave Les Trois-Freres.
Hands, Chauvet cave, 36,000 B.C. Behind ninety-two handprints, painted at a height of about two meters, the figure of a bison or a rhinoceros can be seen. Image processing revealed that all handprints belong to the same person who used only their right hand.
Paleolithic cave art is characterized by distinct aesthetics and high technical skill in craftsmanship, along with the simultaneous presence of realism and abstraction. The Paleolithic artist played with shadows and lines. Through the unified color, natural forms of cave backgrounds, and different sizes of figures, a sense of spatial dimensionality and dynamism is achieved. The painted animals appear lifelike. Rarely static, they walk, run, fight, or rest, swaying and neighing.
Apart from faithfully depicted creatures from nature, numerous abstract symbols can be found: dots, circles, lines, crosses, sticks, of various lengths and thicknesses, zigzags, serpentines, and rhomboid symbols. Scientists today believe these to be fundamental thematic models, with the most daring proclaiming them as Paleolithic ideograms.
In the Magdalenian sanctuary of the Les Trois-Freres cave, eleven zigzag symbols are consistently associated with the bison. In the “salon Noir” of the Niaux cave, curvy signs are regularly drawn near the tail, and angular ones near the flank of the bison. Such repetitions of realistically depicted figures and abstract symbols are characteristic of other painted caves as well, suggesting elements of specific messages, whose meaning was clearly understood by the people who They were depicted.
The most complex abstract signs are called tektiforms and claviforms. Tektiforms often resemble huts or roofs. To date, about fifty of them have been found, and they are always drawn in red or black in the Magdalenian caves of Perigord: Bernifal, Les Combarelles, Font-de-Gaume, Rouffignac, and are a kind of symbolic connection of these caves. Around fifty claviforms in stick shape have also been found; they are always painted in red and are characteristic of six French caves: Niaux, Fontanet, Le Portel, Le Mas-d’Azil, Les Trois-Freres, and Le Tuc d’Audoubert. Both tektiforms and claviforms are often associated with animal figures. Their meaning has not been deciphered.
Sanctuary of the cave
One of the most mystical parts of the painted cave is certainly the “sanctuary.” This name was first used by the French archaeologist Andre Leoi-Gourhan in the 1970s for a particular place in the cave that obviously had a special role. In the simplest case The dominant theme within it is focused on a specific area of the underground network of corridors and chambers. In Altamira, we find a gathering of twenty red and black bisons and twenty red signs related to bisons on the surface of a one hundred square meter ceiling. In the Pech-Merle cave, the paintings indicate the existence of two separate sanctuaries: an older one with a dotted horse frieze, hand images, and a “hieroglyphic” ceiling, and a younger one with a “mammoth chapel.”
Anthropomorphic depictions are common in cave sanctuaries. Abbe Breuil referred to these mysterious figures as sorcerers. Nowadays, scientists are less likely to associate their appearance with shamanism, hunting magic, and fertility, and lean more towards calling them semi-divine beings that one encounters at the end of the journey, in the deepest and darkest part – the cave sanctuary.
Scene from the Rotunda or Hall of Bulls, Lascaux, France, 17000 BC.
Ancient celestial maps
The most famous part of the Lascaux cave is the Hall of Bulls or Rotunda, where the upper parts of the walls This space, almost entirely covered in images of animals of monumental proportions and abstract symbols, with a total of over a thousand drawings, reliefs, and paintings. The whole scene is called the “Cosmic Procession of Animals,” also known as the “Sistine Chapel of the Paleolithic.” Leading the procession is a being with two horns on a small head, round eyes, strong legs, a large belly, and six circular markings on its body, which scientists have named “Unicorn.” Following are other characters surrounded by various symbols: cows, a black deer, a red cow, fighting goats, horses, bulls, totaling around four hundred animals.
German scientist, Dr. Michael Rappenglueck from the University of Munich, attempted to answer the question of what cave art meant to people who lived millennia before us. Why did they paint caves with bulls, horses, and deer, and what did the peculiar horned creature represent? The initial answer he provided was sharply criticized, but over time, it gained followers among may. Thematic researchers and astronomers who continued with their investigations. Rappenglueck believes that the scenes from Lascaux represent a map of the sky from seventeen thousand years ago. On the face of one of the bulls, he discovers points that he identifies as the stars Aldebaran and the Pleiades. For seven points above the shoulder blades of the adjacent bull, he believes it represents the Pleiades constellation, and Aldebaran, the Pleiades, and the Hyades together form the constellation Taurus. “If this bull was found in a medieval manuscript, and not on a cave wall,” says Dr. Rappenglueck, “it would immediately be recognized as Taurus.” Building on this theory, other astronomers have identified Orion and Gemini in the next bull, and Leo and parts of Virgo in the following.
Rappenglueck believes that the groups of symbols drawn between the bulls, antelope, and horse mark the 29 days of the Moon’s cycle. Each point signifies one day of the Moon’s appearance in the sky, and the empty square its disappearance before the appearance of the young Moon, creating the impression of the Moon’s passage through the constellations depicted on the ceiling of the Chamber. Not of any bulls. Through computer analysis and animation of the constellation, it was discovered that the painted scene corresponds to the sky during the summer solstice around seventeen thousand years ago.
Caves like Lascaux were painted by three generations of artists. In some places on the ground, layers of tiles with more or less successful “studies” have been found. There probably was something that could be described as “art schools” because there was undoubtedly a certain way of teaching and passing on skills.
Due to damages on the painted walls caused by the openness of the caves, lighting, the passage of a large number of people, and microbiological contamination, most caves are now closed to the public. Replicas made are a good example of cultural monument protection but also a great opportunity for research.
Another picture from Lascaux attracts a great deal of interest from scientists, primarily astronomers and mathematicians. It is a scene located in the heart of the cave, depicting a bull, a strange bird-headed man, and a bird on a stick. The location in the cave where this scene is situated is extremely inaccessible. To reach it, one must crawl through a narrow channel and then descend into the darkness of the lower gallery using ladders installed today. The Magdalenians used ropes, remnants of which were found at the bottom of the room. One of the last filmmakers of Lascaux, Mario Ruspoli, writes in his book: “It is impossible for someone who has never descended here to imagine the mystical atmosphere that reigns at this place so charged with power that a person starts to whisper…” The eyes of the bull, bird-man, and bird are believed to represent the three brightest stars Vega, Deneb, and Altair. These stars together form what is now popularly known as the “Summer Triangle” and are among the brightest areas in the sky during the summer months in the northern hemisphere. Seventeen thousand years ago, this region of the sky did not set below the horizon and was most prominent during the spring equinox.
This is not the only evidence of prehistoric man’s interest in the night sky. While s In Lascaux, only the constellations along the ecliptic were marked, while in Altamira, individual constellations of the entire visible sky were recognized. The paintings depicted the polar star of that time, circumpolar constellations near it, and at the bottom were Scorpio, Taurus, and Leo. Some constellations were also discovered in the Spanish cave, Cueva de El Castillo.
And finally, we are left with no choice but to repeat the question: what did cave art mean to those people who lived so many millennia before us? The answer to this question will likely remain hidden. However, it is not difficult to imagine how the rhythm of movement of the painted magical figures permeated the being of the Magdalenian and united them with the rhythm of the painted sky. Walking from the cave entrance towards the sanctuary, passing through narrow corridors, experiencing the painted scenes, reading abstract signs, they stepped towards their own sanctuary – the center of the soul, to that point where the sky and earth meet within ourselves.