The discovery of the Chauvet cave (France), at Christmas 1994, changed the conception of European prehistory and even of humanity itself.
Until then, it had always been thought that prehistoric art had evolved from the most complex to the simplest, from the red dots and the hands on the walls to the bison of Altamira or the horses of Lascaux, two caves considered until then the
chapels. sixtinas
of parietal art.
The most important polychrome figures in these two caves were painted on the rock in late prehistory, some 15,000 years ago, during the Magdalenian.
However, Chauvet transformed everything. Since the drawings had been made with charcoal, they could be dated with some precision: the panels of the lions and the horses, indisputable masterpieces, were made more than 30,000 years ago and showed an amazing mastery of drawing. There is more time distance between the woolly rhinos of Chauvet and the bison of Altamira than between Picasso and the Cantabrian cave. The times of prehistory are always enormously long, almost incomprehensible: between some Chauvet drawings, made one on top of the other, there is a distance of 5,000 years, the same that separates us from the civilizations of Mesopotamia. In Lascaux and Altamira drawings of almost 30,000 years have also been found,which means that for millennia human beings entered these cavities to shape their symbolic world.
IMAGINE THE PREHISTORY / 1 Sex between Neanderthals and 'sapiens'
IMAGINE PREHISTORY / 2 A journey to the age of the mammoths
Since
homo sapiens
, modern man, arrived in Europe some 40,000 years ago and that the first drawings and works of art, such as Hohle Fels's Venus, carved from mammoth ivory, appear almost immediately on this continent, it means that art already came with them from Africa during their long migration.
In fact, wall art appears on all continents and there is increasing evidence that Neanderthals, the closest human species to ours, also had symbolic capacity (although no figurative representations are known).
Wherever there have been modern human beings they have produced representations of reality.
However, an abyss separates us from the cave drawings because we have lost any cultural connection with that remote world: we have forgotten their meaning.
Drawing of a mammoth in the Cantabrian cave of Altamira.Universal History Archive / Universal Images Group via Getty
"These images are memories of long-forgotten dreams," he explains about the drawings by Chauvet Werner Herzog, narrator and director of one of the most beautiful documentaries made on prehistory,
The Cave of Forgotten Dreams
(which can be seen in Filmin ). "Will we ever be able to understand the vision of artists across such an abyss of time?" He asks. The answer is no, because there is no longer any cultural link with prehistoric European civilizations.
The drawings and engravings that decorate hundreds of caves in Europe offer an exciting spectacle and remain the only window to the cultural and symbolic world of human beings who lived tens of thousands of years ago; but we will never know what they meant to them. Paleolithic art experts are concerned above all with classification — which animals appear most often, when were the paintings made, what information can we glean from the hands on the walls. In addition, all theories are kept alive until the next discovery, which can derail them in an afternoon, as happened with Chauvet.Do more herbivores appear than carnivores because they painted more or because we have had the bad luck that some drawings have been erased over the millennia and others not? Drawings of human beings are sketchy and much less elaborate than those of animals. Will there be a cave somewhere waiting to be discovered to change this theory?
Aboriginal Paintings in Kimberley (Australia) DEA / N. CIRANI / De Agostini via Getty Images
American journalist Gregory Curtis is the author of an extraordinary book on wall art:
Cave Painters.
The mystery of the first artists
(Turner). Studied for only a century, Curtis explains of cave art: “There is still no global theory about the meaning of cave paintings. This is frustrating for scientists and hobbyists alike, since as works of art, paintings are able to communicate directly and very effectively. Whatever the cultural reasons that prompted ancient hunters to paint in the caves, the great artists among them - who were many - went to the trouble to create paintings of graceful lines, subtle coloring, precise perspective, and a physical feel. of volume. Cave painters may or may not conceive of art as we understand it, but when they decided to draw visually appealing lines rather than clumsy squiggles,they thought and acted like artists, trying to create art in the sense that we give the term ”.
It is clear that there is a stylistic unity and techniques that are maintained over the millennia and in relatively remote territories, although we do not know, and will never know, how those ideas were transmitted.
Everything that surrounded that oral tradition - the stories, the music, the myths, the relationship with the divine - has been lost in the dream of the centuries.
There is only one place where, perhaps - because you can never be entirely sure what has changed over the millennia - those songs and myths have been kept alive: Australia.
Drawings in the Lascaux cave, France.PIERRE ANDRIEU / AFP via Getty Images
The
sapiens homos
arrived in Australia long before Europe: the latest theories speak of this territory reached 65,000 years ago and, until the arrival of Europeans in 1770, remained isolated from the rest of the world. Despite being mercilessly exterminated by Westerners, they kept alive what Bruce Chatwin called
The Strokes of Song
(Peninsula) in his book on the mainland island, the ancestral tales linked to the land. The Aborigines remain the oldest living culture on earth.
The latest season of the great Australian crime series
Mystery Road
- it has not reached any Spanish platform, but it can be purchased on DVD - has a subplot in which an Aboriginal association protests against an archaeological excavation because they believe it violates their ancestral traditions. However, in the end they reach an agreement and an aboriginal leader helps the anthropologist: when she unearths a stone dyed with pigments from more than 60,000 years ago, she explains that it is about colors and techniques that, millennia later, her people still use. at funerals. In that corner of northern Australia, the memory of forgotten dreams has not been lost.
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