A new perspective on art and early man

Vallon-Pont-d'Arc, France — Deep within the limestone hills of the Ardeche region lies the secret entrance to Chauvet, the 34,000-year-old grotto called “the Sistine Chapel of prehistoric art.” Ft. Knox-grade technology protects its opening. Inside are the oldest paintings now known to man, works so important and so fragile that the elite team of researchers assigned to study them is obliged to work under draconian conditions.

For the lucky few who have been allowed inside Chauvet since a trio of speleologists first stumbled across it in 1994, almost everything is off-limits. Nothing in the stalactite-filled cave may be touched -- not the 447 animal paintings on the walls or the 83 bear skulls littering the floor or even the 4,000 or so footprints embedded in the ground.

In fact, conditions in the 1,500-foot cave are so unstable that there are even limits on breathing. To maintain the delicate level of carbon dioxide on which the cave has grown dependent, no more than 10 people are allowed inside for a maximum of eight hours at a time.

Researcher Philippe Fosse remembers wondering, “How are we going to work if we can’t touch or move anything?”

The last time humans visited Chauvet was during the Ice Age. Dinosaurs were long gone, but man was still working with flint tools when about 22,000 BC something caused the rocks above the cave to tumble down, closing off its large entrance. Insects visited the cave during the subsequent thousands of years, but until 1994 that was it. And so Chauvet became a historian’s dream: a place where time had stopped.

The discovery by Jean-Marie Chauvet and his two friends caused an international frenzy. Academics, art fans and journalists clamored for a peek inside the cavern. The French government, under President Francois Mitterrand, decided to offer scientific teams from around the world a chance to study the cave but finally appointed a team of 30 specialists from universities and think tanks across France. Because of preservation concerns, the research group is allotted only two two-week study visits a year, precious time its members dedicate to gathering as much information as possible to occupy them for the next six months.

A typical study day begins shortly before the sun rises over the nearby hills. After a big cup of coffee and a baguette the team splits into groups -- those going inside the cave, and those staying behind to review the previous day’s findings.

It’s a good half-hour hike to the cave through sun-drenched vineyards and clusters of pines from the no-frills center where the research group lives and works. The sure-footed experts, who look more like bookworms than nature lovers, pause briefly to pick wild thyme or roll a cigarette.

A clearing reveals the cave’s opening, hidden by trees and a jutting mass of rock. The researchers shed their outerwear and don fleece bodysuits and hard hats fitted with strong lights. On average, they remain in the cave three hours at a time. When they push back the big steel door and pull themselves out of the long, narrow tunnel into the cave, they are exhausted -- a result of the cold, the lack of oxygen and the physical imperatives of their work. But they also look blissful.

Valerie Feruglio, a 39-year-old art historian, recalls her first visit. “The artwork was so emotional, it was like seeing a Leonardo drawing -- and feeling him doing it. At Chauvet you feel that close to the artist.”

Fellow art historian Carole Fritz shivers with pleasure as she adds, “I even cried the first time I saw it. It’s just so intense, like sometimes when you are listening to opera; it just moves something in your heart. And then you see these finger marks on the walls where they spread the pigment and dried their hands and you really have the feeling they just left the cave.”

No humans are represented in the paintings, but there are 14 types of beasts, including lions, mammoths, horses, rhinoceroses and panthers often portrayed in groups and usually in motion. The animals are not mere symbols -- they live and breathe and display emotions. As Feruglio puts it, “Here the panels are alive, each animal has a life of its own, and there is motion, a real story. What is sure is that this artist had great sensitivity.”

Not to mention surprisingly advanced technique. Until recently it was assumed that skills such as composition, perspective, shading and understanding of anatomy evolved slowly over the centuries. Indeed, when Chauvet was discovered, Jacques Toubon, then France’s minister of culture, announced that this “treasure for humanity” most likely dated from 20,000 BC to 17,000 BC. So when carbon dating conducted on campfire remnants, torch marks and paintings later placed the paintings in two intervals between 32,000 and 23,000 BC, the art world gasped.

(The recent discovery of three beautiful, highly crafted tiny ivory carvings in Germany, dating from about the same period, also tends to foil the theory of a gradual evolution in prehistoric art.)

Fritz and Feruglio hope to discover how the Chauvet drawings were executed: How many artists were there, how much time did it take them to draw, how did they map out their work?

It is an arduous process. There are 15 interconnected caverns in the section of Chauvet being studied. Crouching on a steel and aluminum walkway built to avoid any further damage to the ground, Fritz and Feruglio begin by taking high-resolution digital photographs of the works, which will be scanned into computers at the lab.

At the next visit they bring a printout of the scanned photograph, covered with a sheet of clear plastic upon which they can add details of the composition missed by the camera. The artists knew how to use the cave’s uneven surfaces to their advantage by incorporating the bumps and hollows into their paintings -- today these three-dimensional variations tend to confuse the camera’s computerized eye.

RED, WHITE, BLACK

And there are other pitfalls in the photographic recordings. The cave artists used three colors: white, which they achieved by scratching, red from ochre and black from charcoal. In some cases the etching is slight, and the white lines are visible to the human eye but not to the camera. The delicate degrees of shading with ochre and charcoal often are just as difficult to detect. Beaming the light from their helmets through the pitch darkness, the women record the details missing from the photograph onto the plastic -- information that will be fed into the computer using Photoshop.

Their labor has yielded fascinating results: To begin with, the art historians have found many marks indicating that the artists cleaned the surface of the wall with their hands before starting to work. This indicates that tens of centuries ago, humans already were interested in the quality of their work and not just creating a mere representation.

By examining the compositions, Fritz has reconstructed how they were done and which animals were drawn on top of others. On her computer, she even has constructed a composite drawing of an artist at work during several periods of one composition. Fritz refers to the artist as “she,” and her computer animation comes complete with a ponytail. “There is no reason this could not have been a woman,” she asserts with a smile. “Sure, these are probably hunting scenes and men were usually the hunters, but there are also cases of women hunters.”

The notion of the artist’s presence is one that comes up constantly in discussions. For example, Feruglio says that “if you stay in the cave and turn off your light and just take in the atmosphere ... you feel a communion with the space and with the atmosphere, which is wonderful because you can try to imagine what it is they were feeling.”

Fritz and Feruglio also believe they have solved the mystery of how many artists were active at Chauvet. “Already we can tell by the way that several of the compositions were done that they were probably the work of one or two people,” Fritz says. “For example, you find the same little tick in the chins of animals at different parts of the cave.”

Prehistorian Bernard Gilly, a long, lean man of many ideas but few words, believes the cave is testimony to a surprisingly advanced culture. “The work in the cave is so complex it’s obviously the work of a developed society, an impressive civilization that could organize a sanctuary of this amplitude. Even if it was just one artist, you would need someone else to hold a flame for light.”

Archeologist Philippe Fosse is called “the bear guy” because of his field of interest -- and perhaps the thick beard on his lively face. He is endlessly amazed by the bounty at Chauvet. “In other caves you have to dig and hunt to find things; here it is like an open book, everything is just sitting on the walls and the ground.”

Most of the bones Fosse and his colleagues have discovered are bear bones: 3,700 of them. (They have yet to find any human bones.) They are scattered throughout the cave, and there is a theory that, much like Hansel and Gretel, humans might have used the bones to mark territory or to find their way back to a location.

Then there is the more complicated matter of the “bear altar.” At the center of the so-called Cavern of the Skull, a bear skull has been placed upon a large rock that had fallen from the ceiling. It certainly looks like someone put the skull there for a reason.

“During the first half of the 20th century there was a virulent polemic around the possibility of a cult of the cave bear in prehistory,” Fosse explains. “Then the theory died out for several decades. That’s why a visit to Chauvet is so destabilizing. We are obliged to call into question everything we learned before.”

One of the most sensational discoveries has nothing to do with the artists or bears. Michel Garcia, who studies the foot and paw prints left behind in the damp clay floor, believes he has found tracks of what might have been a prehistoric dog.

Until Chauvet, the earliest dog prints came from Germany and were dated to about 12,000 BC. Garcia believes his prints are about 26,000 years old.

Garcia also has found about 80 human footprints whose length and width lead him to believe they were made by a boy of about 10, walking barefoot at about the same time as the dog. The dog’s tracks appear to intertwine with those of the boy’s, visiting the same areas. Garcia has found traces only of the dog’s print on top of the boy’s. The day he finds the inverse, he’ll have proof to support his hunch that the boy and dog visited the cave together, thereby placing the history of man and his best friend at the beginning of human memory.

The team is led by Jean-Michel Geneste, 53, a handsome, mustachioed Frenchman who is chief curator of the famous Lascaux caves about 180 miles west of here. In Geneste’s opinion, the work at Chauvet is more sophisticated than that of Lascaux, even though the Lascaux paintings are a few thousand years younger. “At Chauvet the faces of the animals are more alive; you feel the presence of the animal. At Lascaux the drawings are more like symbols of the animals they represent.”

They expect to be at work for decades. Team members continuously publish articles about their research and have published a beautiful coffee table book, “Chauvet Cave: The Art of Earliest Times” by Jean Clottes and Paul G. Bahn (University of Utah, 2003).

Their findings are putting the little we know about the earliest history of art -- and man -- in new perspective. Yet despite, or because of, its great importance, tourists probably will never visit Chauvet. The experts have learned from mistakes made at Lascaux which, after its opening to the public in 1940, attracted so many people that the authorities had to close it to avoid further damage from excess carbon dioxide. Today a replica of part of Lascaux is open to the public, and there is talk of creating one of Chauvet too.