Twenty Thousand Years Beneath the Ground
The amazing paintings of stone age people reveal an unexpected intelligence
“No man ever steps in the same river twice, for it's not the same river and he's not the same man.”
Heraclitus
Imagine being led by your twelve-year old daughter into a dark cave entrance and seeing beautiful paintings on its ceiling. Lots of these paintings covered the walls, going too far back into the cave for you to walk. How do you explain this? Who made these pictures? Why? Why are there so many of them? You hold your lantern up to scene after scene of bison, deer, horses, antelopes and long-extinct mastodons painted in subtle but vibrant colors.
In 1879, that had to be a stunning experience for Marcellino Sanz de Sautuola, an amateur archaeologist in northern Spain, who later would name that ceiling “the Sistine Chapel of Prehistory”
Sautuola had drawings of the paintings published in a book about his discovery in 1880. His findings were generally regarded with disbelief. The influential French prehistorian Édouard Cartailhac denounced them as a fraud. Not until other similar paintings had been found in southwestern France (1895–1901) was Sautuola’s contribution finally vindicated. Cartailhac later apologized and admitted he had been wrong. But it was too late for Sautuola who had died 14 years earlier.
The universal assumption at the time was that prehistoric humans were simply not smart enough to make such works because they lacked abstract thought!
But think again!
We look people of the past in much the same way even today. To our seemingly sophisticated minds it doesn’t seem possible that ancient people could have known how to build the Pyramids or to align Stonehenge with lunar, solar and planetary movements or to cut through granite with primitive tools as though it were butter or even to build cathedral domes or lengthy aqueducts.
And so, in a vain effort to understand such baffling things, we credit them to ancient aliens from other planets or lost systems of magic or extinct giants or other fabricated origins while seeking wisdom in our cell phones, sit-coms and the nightly news.
The people who painted these figures thousands of years ago were revealing who they were and what they saw to anyone who might come along after them. Seeing their work is like peering through a window into the far distant past.
The idea of time travel has long intrigued humans, even to the point of some believing it possible and making movies and TV programs about it. But the ancient Greek philosopher, Heraclitus, wisely saw that you can’t step into the same river twice. The water you were in a second ago has moved on with the current and you have moved on in time with each heartbeat. We can’t be in the river before we step into it. So it is with our lives. Each moment that emerges is disappearing at the very same instant that it emerges.
We can’t go forward in time and we can’t go back in time. But we can see and appreciate things others left for us long before we arrived. The paintings at Altamira Cave are silent witnesses to that.
And they’re not the only ones.
In the Dordogne region of France is the Cave of Lascaux, yet another example of Paleolithic cave art, featuring hundreds of works similar to those at Altamira.
In September, 1940, the entrance to the Lascaux Cave was discovered by 18-year-old Marcel Ravidat when his dog, Robot, investigated a hole left by an uprooted tree. He returned with three friends who entered the cave through a 50-foot shaft which they thought might be a secret passage to the nearby Lascaux Manor. The cave and the art on its walls quickly became famous around the world.
An image almost unbelievably ahead of its time …
One of the Altamira paintings, in particular, is an attempt to replicate animation by showing how the legs of a wild pig look when it is running. This one image impressed me more than any other because it demonstrates an ability to convey motion in a still picture. And it does!
Equally amazing is the fact that these stone age cave paintings appear all around the world and most of them are very similar in age and appearance. Early peoples, who couldn’t have had any knowledge of each other, independently came up with surprisingly similar motifs in their art.
One of those universal motifs is the negative image of a hand, sprayed onto the stone surface with an ingenious yet very simple “airbrush”, consisting of a hollow reed filled with pigment and a separate reed used for blowing the pigment onto a wall. These images appear in some places as a single hand and at others as a group of hands, possibly of the same individual.
If our Stone Age ancestors ate salad we can only speculate what was in it. However, if they had the ingredients in the one featured below we can be assured that they relished it with primitive gusto. The best part is you can make it in your own cave and it’s really easy. Become a paid subscriber and find out how it’s made and you will greatly help “Eat Your History” to remain alive.
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