In Mysteries of the Earliest Prehistoric Paintings

Chauvet-Pont d’Arc Cave experienced first human occupation between 37,000 and 33,500 years ago, then a second between 31,000 and 28,000 years ago. He has also experienced animal occupations, particularly cave bears. Among the representations found in the cave, animal imagery predominates, horse, lion, bison, bear, rhinoceros… Human representation in Paleolithic art is less than 4% of the corpus total from 38,000 to 12,000 years ago, the female figure predominates. Panels of animal representations are staged, rooms are spaces where drawings and connections respond to each other. These Paleolithic men, these Homo sapiens, represented their culture, their myths and their environment on the walls.

Carol Fritz, an expert on prehistoric art, CNRS researcher, currently directs the Emil-Kartelheck Center for the Research and Study of Prehistoric Art. for that, The study of Chauvet Cave allows us to give another definition of Paleolithic population. The definition is often physical, it is done by the shape of their tool, with Chauvet we define a culture by what it thinks, how it sees the world, we are at the root of the symbolic thought of Homos sapiens.

An exceptionally well-preserved archaeological treasure

On December 18, 1994, while exploring a canyon in the Ardèche, three French speleologists made an extraordinary discovery: While searching for unknown passages in the region’s cave network, Jean-Marie Chauvet noticed a slight flow of air through a small rocky opening. Interestingly, the three cavers decided to widen the opening, and after sliding through this opening, opened a series of galleries and rooms decorated with frescoes and animal carvings. A real one The masterpiece is dated around -38,000, making these paintings the oldest in the world

. There is nothing better than a privileged visit to a cave which is the most beautiful archaeological discovery of cave art in recent years.

It is a cave that you enter through the roof with a descent of ten meters. It consists of very large rooms that are more than 30 meters long and vaults 20 meters high. The traffic moves slowly and as they proceed, the archaeologists find the first red mammoth at the entrance to the Cactus Gallery. These discoveries are made in the following two days, after which an official announcement is made to the gendarmerie.
Between December 18, 1994 and January 1995, the Minister of Culture took the first protective measures, notably marking, and ensuring that the cave was closed to the public, especially since it was extremely well preserved. protected by time. The researcher recalls that there was a complete accumulation of extraordinary parameters which meant that after 30,000 years, we found the cave in a perfect state of preservation: “This is a miracle of this cave, because apart from the extraordinary cavity aspect, the preservation of the archaeological remains is simply exceptional. We owe its very good preservation to the natural closure of the mandapa 20,000 years ago, caused by three rockfalls. Today it survives very well due to very high levels of CO2 that naturally buffers the atmosphere and inhibits bacterial growth.

“

When man was one with the rest of the living world

This is what these prehistoric artists wanted to tell us through these 300 cave paintings. Prehistoric humans thought of themselves as animals among others, his imagination probably inhabits a great continuity with the entire living world. However, from -38,000 years ago to the closure of the cave -20,000 years ago, that is 20,000 years of human presence, which means that the first artists were not at all like the last artists who frequented the cave.
According to the researcher, it is important to be able to free ourselves from our final vision of the overall function, because this cave shows the fascinating natural relationship that our prehistoric ancestors maintained with the rest of the living world, that is, an existence carved into natural existence. Mixture without it is no anthropological state of his mind: “We note that there are no traces of erasures on the walls by other subsequent artists, which means that this cave shows that successive populations accepted what they saw and at the same time completed pre-existing representations. It is a time when early prehistoric humans lived in harmony with all other living things. In this environment, humans are an animal among other animals and prey to some of these animals.“

Because this cave is actually an enormous herd where it is fundamental, to understand it, to free ourselves from our contemporary anthropological vision. The 500 or 600 performance The number of animals shows that the animal environment, considered as a whole, was the main vector of the symbolic thought of prehistoric humans. A prehistoric social group is represented not by individualism, but by the overall community of living beings

: “Representations of our prehistoric ancestors go mainly through images of animals rather than humans, because during this entire period, between 40,000 and -12,000, the percentage of the human figure on the entire theme of the Late Paleolithic represents not only 4%, it is none! Humans do not see themselves as omnipotent, but only as animals among others. His thinking goes through the animal image, these are lions, rhinoceroses, mammoths, horses, bison, ibex, all herders that we find during the latest Paleolithic.“

► Remaining to be heard…