Photos: Left: Lions hunting bisonBelow:
Horse panel
Both photos courtesy of the
Metropolitan Museum of Art
In 1994 in the Ardeche Valley in France, roughly halfway between Nimes and Lyon, three cave explorers moved some rubble that was blocking a passage and uncovered the vast Chauvet cave. Animal remains show that during the stone age, this place was occupied by hibernating cave bears who left scratches on the walls. The cave also contains ibex and wolf skeletons. According to scholar Jean Clottes, writing in the Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History, radiocarbon dating has set the age of most of the cave paintings at between 32,000 and 30,000 BP (before the present) in radiocarbon years. Red ochre hand stencils and a human footprint are the indelible marks of the people who created the art. The French Ministry of Culture offers an online tour of the cave complex.
How remarkable that these astonishing works of art are so old. This indicates that the peoples of the distant past were far less primitive than proud moderns have been willing to believe.
Note: In Werner Herzog's stunning documentary of this "Cave of Forgotten Dreams" (2012), he mentions that it is located only a few miles from one of France's largest nuclear reactors. The water from its cooling system has been used to create an environment for heat-loving reptiles: alligators and crocodiles. The situation puts these ancient human treasures in jeopardy.
These artworks are stunningly beautiful, and bear testimony to a highly developed aesthetic sensibility. They give us a window into the long-vanished Palaeolithic past, and a vivid portrayal of the now extinct fauna which shared the world with our distant European ancestors. There was nothing primitive about these people. Compare these timeless works to those of alleged contemporary artists such as Tracey Emin, which are essentially the product of talentless narcissists obsessed with producing ugliness and money. Emin's ‘works’ won't be remembered in a century's time, but if there are humans 30,000 years hence, the art of Chauvet will still command the admiration that it so rightly deserves.
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