The Ancients - Lascaux Cave: Ice Age Art

Episode Date: January 21, 2024

Lascaux Cave is an Ice Age wonder. Its walls and ceilings are adorned with stunning depictions of bison, aurochs and deer painted by hunter-gatherers 20,000 years ago using all kinds of pigments from red ochre to violet. They are, quite simply some of the most beautiful examples of Palaeolithic artwork ever discovered.In this episode of The Ancients, Tristan Hughes is joined by Prof. Paul Pettitt to delve into the wonders of Lascaux Cave. Together they explore how supposedly primitive hunter gatherers were capable of drawing such beautiful artwork and reflect on what it means for how we view Palaeolithic hunter gatherer societies today. This episode edited by Aidan Lonergan and produced by Joseph Knight and Annie Coloe.Discover the past with exclusive history documentaries and ad-free podcasts presented by world-renowned historians from History Hit. Watch them on your smart TV or on the go with your mobile device. Get 50% off your first 3 months with code ANCIENTS sign up now for your 14-day free trial HERE.You can take part in our listener survey here.

Hi, I'm Tristan Hughes, and if you would like the Ancient ad-free, get early access and bonus episodes, sign up to History Hit. With a History Hit subscription, you can also watch hundreds of hours of original documentaries, including my recent documentary all about Petra and the Nabataeans, and enjoy a new release every week. Sign up now by visiting historyhit.com slash subscribe. It's the Entrance on History Hit. I'm Tristan Hughes, your host, and in today's episode, well, we are talking about an Ice Age wonder that has been described as a prehistoric Sistine Chapel. It's called Lascaux, a monumental cave in France, adorned with some of the most beautiful depictions of Ice Age Paleolithic art ever discovered.

Richly coloured, these prehistoric painters created hundreds of images of various animals they shared their Ice Age landscape with in Lascaux's various chambers. There are horses, deer, aurochs, bison and more. Roughly 20,000 years old, these paintings are some of the most stunning masterpieces in the history of art, a prehistoric marvel. Now to explain all about Lascaux to give an audio tour of its many chambers, well I was delighted to have Professor Paul Pettit from the University of Durham return to the show. Paul's passion for Ice Age archaeology, it seeps through every time I chat to him. It was such a pleasure to interview him again and I really do hope you enjoy. So without further ado, here's Paul.

Paul, it is wonderful to have you back on the podcast. It's terrific to be back. Thank you for inviting me. You're more than welcome. And for a topic like this, I can't believe we haven't covered Lascaux yet. I mean, Paul, of all cave sites that we know of, Lascaux, it feels like the greatest of them all. I've seen it be described as the Sistine Chapel of prehistory. In fact, a number of cave art sites have been described variously as the Sistine Chapel, but actually Lascaux is the first one to have been, and justifiably so.

You know, it's been over 80 years since it was discovered, and it really does still remain one of the most spectacular, one of the most impressive cave art sites we have in over 500 that are known. So it deserves to be up there on a pedestal and to get your podcast treatment. Well, absolutely. And Paul, no such thing as a silly question to start it all off. I mean, what exactly is Lascaux? What should we be thinking of? Okay. Well, we call it a decorated cave or an example of cave art. So it is a cave system, quite a small one, a number of relatively large chambers or rooms, if you like, like the size of a couple of typical lounges, two or three lounges put together that are linked by narrower and lower

ceilinged passages. It's only a couple of hundred meters long, so it's quite a small one. And it opens out, or at least used to in the Ice Age, into the side of a little dry valley. So its walls have a number of pieces of figurative and non-figurative art on them, drawings and paintings of animals and engravings as well. And it was created, we now know, in the late Upper Paleolithic around 21,000 years ago, give or take a few decades. And it's a really good example of European upper paleolithic cave art that is to say depictions of animals prey animals in the main that were critical to survival by ice age hunter gatherers which probably functioned as we'll discuss I'm sure in a number of very important, perhaps, ritual ways.

So cave art probably is just a sample, the tip of the iceberg, of art that was probably all over the landscape, created all over it by our hunter-gatherers. But of course, the vicissitudes of the Ice Age have erased all of the art that we might expect to have been on the sides of valleys on cliff faces etc and have preserved them in these quite stable microclimates of deep caves kind of nature's refrigerators if you like so it remains in terms of the abundance of the imagery and the technical skills used to create that imagery, one of the most impressive cave art sites that we have. I mean, don't you worry, we are going to be going through those different chambers and looking at all of this art in detail as this podcast progresses. But you mentioned something really interesting there, Paul, you know, how these cave sites are

where you have so much of this art preserved. But when approaching a site like Lascaux, looking out at the surrounding landscape in that area of France, is that important to try and understand why Lascaux was chosen as this place where all of this art was created more than 20,000 years ago? Without doubt. And that really is a critical point. So of some 500 or so caves we know, almost always in Western Europe with cave art, they really vary from a cave with a couple of doodles, you know, a little bit and Bob that seems to be one individual to the spectacular cathedrals like Lascaux. So we can't make any generalizations that they're all churches they're all cathedrals you know everybody went to them all the time but lasco is really up there

and as you quite rightly say it's its location that's important not so because it commands a spectacular view from its mouth but because we know that our late glacial, late ice age hunter-gatherers were residing very close by, probably in rock shelters just down the Vizere River, such as at La Madeleine and elsewhere, in some number, probably for several months of the year so this is a time of year in a really dangerous inhospitable landscape that relatively huge numbers of people come together you know perhaps a couple of hundred and they do all of their things you know they come from hundreds of kilometers around we can tell how they do that by the way they bring different materials in. They tell their stories about what it's like, you know, in London, oh really, this is what

it's like in Durham, etc. And they probably all sing their songs, do their rituals that remind them that they're actually all the same people. They exchange mates and goods and so on and so forth. And we think that the really rich cave art sites like Lascaux, which take probably a lot of people to create, were formed in these conditions of aggregations, as we call them. Because sometimes when you think of the Ice Age and these communities in the Paleolithic, you just think the name or the words hunter-gatherer. But what you highlighted there, Paul, is you can always imagine Lascaux as a communal centre with hundreds of people there.

That is almost mind-blowing to think. Absolutely. That seems to be the case. So if you imagine you leave the cave mouth at Lascaux, you walk down your valley, that takes you into the valley of the Vizere River. Nowadays, it's a lovely tourist hub. At the time it'll be a bit more gravelly, a little more braided, but you'd probably canoe down it a kilometre or two and then you get to your nice campsite. A rock shelter, let's imagine in the village of Les Eysy today, but under that rock shelter there's probably a dozen or so teepee-like structures or yurt-like structures with several groups that spend much of the year apart and hundreds of kilometers apart too, all aggregated together.

So this is a vast number of people for these hunter-gatherers that are so thin on the ground in this dangerous environment. This is important to set the scene before we delve into the art itself. And a couple of more questions before we get there. I'd like to go perhaps even further back in time because, of course, Lascaux and its cave art is incredible. But do we know anything about when cave art emerges, the origins of cave art, and how far along Lascaux is in that whole process? Lascaux's relatively late. So I guess us archaeologists tend to think that when we see something appearing archaeologically, it's then done forevermore thereafter. It's probably

not the case. There's probably long periods of time thousands of years in which little or no cave art is being done and so on but what we can tell now is that we have a probably very long phase of non-figurative art being produced in some caves certainly in spain probably in france some of that's leaving marks of the body, you know, covering the hands with pigment and pressing them on the wall and so on. That's probably done by Neanderthals, the original European indigenous humans,

and perhaps also by the earliest members of Homo sapiens who disperse into the continent. That's probably discontinued, but then figurative art, which I think at the moment we can say who disperse into the continent. That's probably discontinued. But then figurative art, which I think at the moment we can say was exclusive to Homo sapiens, figurative art appears around 37,000, 38,000 years ago. And it appears in portable form, little carvings, but it soon after has been extended into the darkness of caves and their walls and ceilings so cave art as such begins somewhere around 36 37 000 years ago

and it looks very similar from then on we don't have a huge amount of it from that point down to about the age of Lascaux. But Lascaux is critically important. So if you imagine, it appears almost the same amount of time after the first appearance of cave art as what time separates us from Lascaux. The best part of 20,000 years, that puts it in perspective. So in that sense, Lascaux is relatively young if you like but it's at a very important time 21 21 and a half thousand years ago this is at the start of what we call the late upper paleolithic and there's a huge amount of behavioural changes we can see among these hunter-gatherers. They're probably now representing what we see as a very complex hunter-gatherer fissure

that we can recognise in the last few hundred years in various parts of the world. And their art becomes far, far more common. It becomes far, far more variable, more achieved. common it becomes far far more variable more achieved we can see a lot of techniques that are still being used by artists today perspective dynamism ways to make things look animated and so on that really show that these people are really changing so lascaux is at the start of that big bloom of Paleolithic art. And probably about 90% of art that we have from the Upper Paleolithic dates to this late Upper Paleolithic between the time of Lascaux and the end of the Pleistocene or nearing it around 13,000 years ago. Well, let's go from 20,000 years ago to the 20th century, because Paul, talk to me about the discovery story behind Lascaux.

occupation and so on. But as part of the movement of youngsters and so on away from northern France, there was a small group of friends, including one certain Marcel Ravida. And these friends were out one day walking in the woods around the village of Montignac in the woods of what we now would know to be Lascaux. And Monsieur Ravida had his dog, Robbo, we often say robot, but Robbo, with them, who was frolicking around. And Robbo suddenly disappeared down a little fissure, almost too small for a human to get into. almost too small for a human to get into but thankfully little as little robo wouldn't come back to answer calls monsieur ravido crawled into this little space and he thought just to pull out his little dog but found himself in what he said this chamber with animals literally swirling

around his head he had come out in what we now know as the Hall of the Bulls, which is the first, that is the outermost, of really several big chambers in which art was painted and drawn on the ceiling and swirls, as he quite rightly said, around one's head. And thankfully, Marcel Ravida and his friends were really conscientious. They contacted local authorities, who in their turn contacted an eminent prehistorian, the abbé, the father Henri Breuil, who was a larger-than-life figure, one of these French Jesuit priests without portfolio,

who was basically free to conduct his own studies. And Breuil had turned himself into a pioneering prehistorian from the 1920s. Breuil, to his everlasting credit, recognized the importance of Ravidat's discovery, It recognised the importance of Wawidath's discovery, visited the site. There's lovely photographs of him and all the great and good of the local area in there. And thus it came to be known to science. Bit of a delay because of the fog of war, as it was said in the journal Antiquity at the time. But nevertheless, a stunning discovery, really on a par with other archaeological greats like the tomb of Tutankhamun. I'm glad you mentioned the Hall of the Bulls right there,

Paul, because let's talk about the Hall of the Bulls. You've just entered the chamber, the entrance to Lascaux, you've come into this hall. What do you see in this great, almost masterpiece part of Lascaux? So it's relatively narrow. Imagine you're in a long, narrow hallway and the walls slope up to either side of you to just a bit above head height. And then they start coming in and a kind of domed, lengthy ceiling. And it's really around head height that the images begin there's there's almost an artificial floor depicted there where sediments have created a horizontal line probably

the artist thought we'll take that as the floor you know they often don't bother in cave art these animals just float on the walls but anyway they have here Then what you see are several dozen images. It's a stampede of animals, which really culminates. So if you imagine a line of stampeding animals, both each side of your heads that come together with two great bulls, almost life size bulls of aurochs and the extinct cattle so these you know put modern bulls to shame in their size of musculature must have been a ferocious sight out there and this almost certainly is is recording what people have seen the one thing i should say we're talking about what we see but what we hear in these chambers probably was just as important you stand there and you know you're in an echoey chamber these days our our temptation is to clap our hands and hear it reverb or shout out something but no if you stand there and stamp your feet it echoes around and sounds exactly like a stampeding horde this is just one lovely example of how archaeoacoustics, if you like,

were used by our hunter-gatherers. So, no surprise, they heard this sound evocative of stampedes. It reminded them of it, and that's what you see, that they have painted in several colours on the walls above one's head would have taken some degree of collaboration because it's above one's head. And sometimes we get exaggerated. It counts. Oh, it would have needed scaffolding and this sort of thing.

Probably entailed, you know, one person scrabbling up the slope of the wall and another sort of suspending them up, you know, holding them, if you like, or standing on somebody's shoulders or something. But anyway, a lot of work was undertaken to create these dozens of animals in very lifelike form. So it's a really difficult job. Imagine painting the walls. Let's go back to the Sistine Chapel. job. Imagine painting the walls. Let's go back to the Sistine Chapel. That's got a nice flat platform of scaffolding and so on. This doesn't, and it's in the darkness, lit only with flickering torchlight and so on. So it's an immense thing to be able to create. But what we see is this procession of horses and of the extinct wild cattle, bison.

The whole thing seems to be driven by a peculiar animal that you see as you go in on your left. It's usually referred to as the unicorn. It's not. They don't exist, or at least didn't in Ice Age storybooks. But anyway, it looks to me like a badly drawn piebald horse. But it's been created in a way that a lot of the animals are there, not painted as you and I would think with a brush, but it's spat.

So imagine if you want to create a line, the back of an animal or the belly of an animal in an outline drawing you put the two sides of your hands outside sides uh close to each other and you use that as a guide to spit pigment out of your mouth at it and that the lines of your hand define the lines of the animal so the unicorn so to speak has been created by spitting. But then, at a later date, still in the upper Paleolithic, somebody has drawn two straight lines out of its forehead, hence the unicorn notion. So we don't know why, but they painted those with a brush, probably of horsehair. But anyway, that's a distinct thing.

But the important thing is, as with some of the other chambers in lasco where this theme is repeated this animal seems to be setting off this great stampede go on after you it's doing and we have a lot of horses and a lot of these aurochs and that are stampeding and it's captured right at the point where these two lead bulls are about to clunk their heads together bang you know so a frighteningly energetic and violent scene is swirling around our heads i mean absolutely you mentioned these different colors what colors are we talking about so outlines of the animals are often undertaken in black. That's probably created by charcoal or the mineral pigment manganese dioxide. The horses, these are the

most numerous, but they're smaller in scale than the aurochs, which are the ones who are most visually striking, hence the term. But the horses are all depicted in their winter and summer coats. They're lovely biscuity colours with russet back lines and often black manes and tails. They're most striking. They're Sunday best, if you like. And the aurochs are depicted in their white and black with dots on them. They're spotted jersey like aurochs, if you like.

But we have other colours, too. So we have the whole palette of ochres, of hematites from yellow to brown to red, so so-called red ochre, blacks and even the odd violet as well, which is another shade of hematite. So for Paleolithic paintings or drawings, it's a really colourful world that's depicted down here. Really colourful world. And as you say, above eye level as well, which adds to that astonishing nature of it. I hadn't even considered that acoustic nature of it that you highlighted earlier. I must also ask, when you look at these masterpieces, you mentioned how it seems like people are coming back to this cave and adding more at a later date. Do you sometimes see a

difference almost in quality? You have the masterpieces and then maybe some depictions are more like taking your child to work day kind of level. Occasionally. The striking thing about Lasca lasco and pretty much with all paleolithic cave art is that the quality of craftsmanship is usually really excellent it's very rare to get those poor things but having said that the so-called unicorn i think is one of those so the differences do exist yes they're not very pronounced in terms of quality, but what they are pronounced in is the conventions of how people do things. So you and I might have, if somebody asked us, hey, Tristan, hey, Paul, why don't you

both draw a horse? We probably have our own ways of doing them and how we drew the horse's hooves, for example. And this is a classic one we see at lasco some of the artists don't bother with the hooves they just bring the legs the lower legs to a point they're unfinished whereas others not only do hooves but they depict them in a very odd way all of the animals are depicted side on as if we're looking at the sides of the animals very common characteristic in paleolithic art almost everything's done like that but the hooves are depicted as if we're looking down at them from the bottom if you like or looking up at them from the bottom

so they're kind of displaced it's almost as if the viewer is looking at the horse then picking one of its feet up and just you know lifting it up and looking at the bottom of the hoof and there's a stylistic convention of how that's done they're called lasco hooves anyway the interesting thing is we have several other caves in the vicinity of lasco in which we get a similar mix there's a cave called gabi you nearby another one called le portel up a little bit further in the charron where lascoe are getting their little stone lamps to light their way by the way but anyway what seems to be the case is that at least two groups are coming together the kind of lascoe hoof type group and the Gabiou let's not bother with hoof-type group. This is one of a

number of ways we can see that this isn't the creation of one artistic genius and her or his artistic school, but a number of people coming together and creating this communally. Now, you read my mind about those stone lamps, and I wanted to kind of explore them more as we delve deeper into the cave. But in the Hall of Bulls, if this was really near the entrance of the cave, was there much natural light that reached this chamber, or would these people have been using lamps to create their art there as well? Well, certainly some of the French experts on Lascaux have described the light levels in that

first chamber the hall of the bulls as a crepuscular light in other words you know you get that poor light pouring into the cave when lighting outside is is at its height but most of the art as with pretty much all cave art is way away from natural light into the darkness. So as you rightly bring up the subject of lamps, artificial lighting is absolutely critical to going into these depths. And, you know, there's no prosaic reason to be in these caves other than in the daylight zone where you can camp and so on you know there's nothing valuable to eat in them you drink the water in the pools you'll get stomach ache you know you can sprain your ankle or worse there could be hibernating lions or something worse in them too so clearly they're exploring these for shall we say non-prosaic reasons and part of that is

lighting their way and in lasco thankfully our artists left several dozen of their lamps on literally on the cave floor and they cluster in places there's one and i'm going to take you further in from the hall of the bulls now but we've got to drop our heads and we've got to, yeah, we've got to crawl through into the confines of the nave. This is where the passage becomes much smaller. We can see how animals such as cave bear have rubbed against it and eroded some of the art there. But nevertheless, it's there. And we have half a dozen of simple little stone lamps that have been quite left where they were burning so imagine it rather like you know the lights of an

old-fashioned theater at the bottom and along the stage you know it's lighting this wall of the nave up like a little tableau but these are little natural pieces of stone. They're just a block of stone picked up from elsewhere in the cave or just outside. And they either have a little natural concavity, such as we can find in stones on the beach today, or the concavity has been created by pecking at them. So they form a little stone bowl and that's the typical Paleolithic lamp. a little stone bowl and that's the typical paleolithic lamp you put a block of animal fat in it let's choose some reindeer fat or some seal fat you put a wick probably of pine or juniper in it and rather like a roman lamp that preserves so frequently and you can see all over the place in museums it'll give you half an hour or so of a very greasy, flickering light. And that's what the typical lamp is for our period. But I know you're thinking of a far nicer example that was

found on the floor of Lascaux. Oh, Paul, am I? Am I indeed? Take it away. What is this lamp? Well, we have one complete and a fragment of a really beautifully carved lamp of limestone it's a kind of red limestone that we know only outcrops about 100 kilometers to the north in charron in the charron department it's a beautiful stone relatively soft that you can carve and if you imagine it's rather like it's got a bowl the business end if you like rather like a small dessert bowl if you like today and that's got an arm on it as well so it looks a bit like a salad spoon with a big bowl on it if you like and that was found in a little drop down towards the end of a part of the cave it's called the

shaft of the dead man and this is clearly a very odd area a little ritual area because as the name implies you have to drop down into this quite constrained confined little area. Obviously, this lamp was used down there as some little natural lamps of stone too. And only a very small number, a handful of images were drawn in black on the wall of this shaft, and one of which seems to be a scene, probably, arguably, the earliest scene we have and what it is is a human who seems to have been freshly killed hence the shaft of the dead man but next to him is a bison and the bison has been disemboweled we have all of its stomach contents coming out of it and and the man seems to have been hit by this bison and killed and is effectively lying down and between them is what i think we can definitely identify as a broken javelin and a so-called spear thrower you know that the length of probably wood and reindeer

antler material that you can use to throw these things so what it seems to represent is this thing where a man has been a hunter-gatherer has been trying to kill this bison it's managed to get the shot off it's disemboweled the bison but the bison has managed to gore this man and perhaps it's a joke you know oh he was lucky or maybe it's one of those mythic stories or whatever. But that area seems to have been a great focus. We have this particularly important lamp there. It's even got a little symbol engraved on it that we find engraved on the walls of Lascaux as well.

Beautiful little link there. And we also have several of the engraved antler or carved antler spearheads that were used by these people at the time. So clearly, almost a rack of javelins have been lent up against the wall there. It's been lit. This peculiar mythic scene has been created down there by the light of this lovely lamp. But it's also interesting how, if that is the earliest art from Lascaux, that in all of the chambers of the cave, it is in this one, the Shaft of the Dead Man, which seems to be right at one of the deepest parts of the whole cave. Yes, exactly. There's two ends of the cave if you imagine it forks the other end

is very interesting is very different to the hall of the bulls that's big communal loud stampede and so on this we're in a crawl space and we only have engravings in it very fine outlines of animals which are very difficult to see in fact three quarters of las which are very difficult to see. In fact, three quarters of Lascaux's art are these difficult to see engravings. It's a far more personal and private art. But anyway, we're back in this crawl space now. We're very muddy. The ceiling's just over our head. We're on our hands and knees.

And if we look carefully, there are images of cave lions engraved in this area. Sound is really deadened now. So perhaps it's no surprise that these silent predators are engraved on the wall. But we really, we can hardly see them. We have to focus on them. It's a very individual thing. So maybe there's a significance to this mysterious end of the cave where we can see it disappearing into darkness, but it narrows so much we can no longer crawl further.

And that is probably the case with the other end of it, where we have the shaft of the dead man. So in Lascaux and these various different parts of the cave, is it almost that different chambers and different passages were sometimes showing different stories or different parts of the cave, is it almost that different chambers and different passages were sometimes showing different stories or different parts of life, of hunting, of the animals that they lived alongside? Does it almost seem as if these different parts of the cave almost served a different purpose for these people? Yes, in a way. I think there's an overarching purpose, or there's two. The first is communal, and several of these bigger chambers,

like the Hall of the Bulls, reflect overall concerns. They are scenes from the tundra, from the Ice Age tundra, that probably have some significance. They could be real events. That time when there was a stampede and, you know, we had a bonanza and so on. They portray a lot of real beautiful little indications. In another chamber, there's a very famous image of an aurochs female, an aurochs cow. And she's usually called the jumping cow or the flying cow because she looks like she's

in a beautiful russet coat, all ready for mating. And she looks like she's in a beautiful russet coat all ready for mating and she looks like she's jumping but actually what she's doing is slipping probably on ice or down a riverbank because one of her rear legs is right up in the area of her chest and her two forelegs are really splayed out you know she's really taken a fall there so that's clearly a scene from life and we don't know why that was depicted so i think overall in the big communal areas the purpose of the art if we can call it that is we're all in it together let's create a tableau of the sermon on the mount so we all understand that you know and then in the next chamber we'll create a tableau of the wedding at cana and we all understand that but there are individual stories within that that

are all being used to signify everybody's contribution but then there's that more personal part of it individual exploration little enclosed rituals you know is it little secret societies is it the certain people say okay you can stay in the main church now you know you enjoy the stampede of the bulls we're just off into the depths where you're not allowed you know so it's extremely complex not only in terms of how it was created, but the themes, the themes within themes, the variability, the visibility changes, and so on, that we would expect. And I hate to use the analogy, but it's inevitable, of modern cathedrals and so on. It's a progression through it with many messages on different levels.

And of all the images that are shown, although we've talked about the cave lion and this human who doesn't seem to have had a very good encounter with this bison, but it seems like the majority, if we talked about the lots and lots of horses, the majority are prey animals that these hunters would have had regular interactions with. Exactly. And that characterises all Paleolithic art. You know, these hunter-gatherers in a Pleistocene environment, without the aid of rifles and sights and all that, you know, are really at the mercy of being able to hunt animals on the hoof.

So these big herbivores, particularly wild particularly wild horse deer either reindeer or red deer as is the case in lasco and big bovids such as bison and aurochs and and the odd mammoth and ibex and so on are really critical to their survival so it's no surprise that they overwhelmingly dominate as subjects of Paleolithic art. Carnivals are always in the minority. They either don't, they're either not depicted in caves or they represent 5-10%, probably the sort of levels that they were out there in the environment, you know. So because of that, and I'm certainly not the first to say this, but specialists such as Norbert ojula who

worked underground in lasco more than anybody even more than boy and michelle laublanche the greatest living we all think that there's a real focus on creation this is why these animals appear caves are these mysterious places where this world meets other ones you look at any culture from any time in any part of the world they'll have these stories and this is probably where these animals that are so important to our hunter gatherers are emerging they're literally dripping out of the ceilings of the caves or falling out of cracks there's a lovely horse literally falling out of a crack it's almost upside down like it's being birthed it's almost as if our artists are recognizing that in the natural shape of the caves my god there seems to be a horse coming into the world there

and what they're doing is basically midwifery. They're helping that process by drawing, completing, if you like, those animals and putting them in the wider context of the world above. Now, we have talked a lot about the animal depictions, but I feel we must also talk about the hands too. Yes, yes, absolutely. Yeah. So come on, Paul, what are these hands that we also see alongside the horses, the aurochs, the bison, an occasional mammoth, and so on? So we have depictions of human hands, if we can call it that, from about 75-ish caves in France and Spain. They are usually created,

as we would call them, as negative hand stencils. In other words, you put your hand against the cave wall, you chew up some pigment, typically red, and you spit it at your hand, and then you remove your hand and it leaves the ghost of you, the shape of your hand on it. Sometimes they're created rather like parents have with their children. You know, you cover the hand with that pigment and press it against the wall, but that's much less common anyway some caves typically will have only one two five or six of these hand stencils a very small number of caves will have a few dozen it's probably not a widespread practice

but we can tell that the antiquity of hand stencils goes back probably the oldest in terms of cave art. So Neanderthals were leaving their hand stencils and probably early Homo sapiens. Perhaps they saw Neanderthal ones and interpreted them. There's some argument that they're observing the marks that cave bears leave on cave walls when they sharpen their claws. Rather like cats, cave bears leave on cave walls when they sharpen their claws rather like cats cave bears will fall against they will stand up on their rear legs fall against the cave wall with their upper their forelimbs stretched and then they'll just let the wall take their weight and they'll slide down it and they'll leave these lovely marks and we can often see these hand stencils placed against

them so it's tempting to think there's some cosmological story people are telling themselves with that but we have a few of these in lasco not many now the thing is i think when we have good evidence on their age the hand stencils seem to be older than figurative art so as with site, as with any modern cathedral, you have art that's left a long time ago, it gets added to and so on and so forth, and you wind up with, you know, the modern art that nobody really looks at and so on, you know, and this is probably the case for a lot of our caves. So the hand stencils, in my opinion, derive from this very early period in which humans are bothering to explore these mysterious places. It's a very odd world in which they're leaving marks of their own bodies, but nothing else. They're not bringing the scenes of the tundra down into these caves as they are by the time we get to Lascaux.

It's probably too late for Neanderthals, isn't it, Lascaux? I mean, could there be any hint that some of the earliest art could have been made by some of the last Neanderthals in this area of the world? Or is it thought that these communities, they must have been Homo sapiens? It remains an open issue because often we can only provide minimum ages for art.

It's actually very difficult to date cave art unless the black pigments are created by charcoal which we can radiocarbon date we can only really date stalactites that formed over the art so you're dating when the stalactite formed and therefore as it formed over art the art must be older but whether it's a day older or you know thousands of years we can't tell But based on the evidence we have at the moment, I think a critical reading of it is that we only have good evidence for non-figurative markings by Neanderthals and for that matter, the earliest Homo sapiens in Europe. I don't think we can. So that's not a bad thing. I think figurative art, while we're impressed by it, cognitively, behaviorally, doesn't necessarily imply anything better. And for that matter, I think for the first few thousand years, Homo sapiens were in Europe. They didn't have any

figurative art anyway. Now, I could be disproven tomorrow, but that's my reading of the data. So I think we have this long period in which people have evolved personalities, if you like, and they're all doing that typical thing that us humans are good at. longer i'm taller i'm brighter you know that kind of thing and it's only when humans really begin creating and living in imaginary worlds and they're saying right let's bring these ice age environments down here and mythologize that story of when you know tristan tried to kill that bison and it got him as well ho ho ho ho, ho. And this kind of thing, that we actually get figurative art. So two very, very different ways of being in the world, if you like. Now, we have covered this topic at length in the other podcast we have recorded, those marks, right at the start of the year. But I feel we must also talk about these too. the year, but I feel we must also talk about these two. Paul, alongside these various depictions of horses and aurochs, you do see these weird marks. Now, what do we think they are?

Well, when we get the marks, they certainly are associated with individuals. So in other words, if you get several lines, they're next to a horse, it's clear that they're saying something about that horse or horse in general similarly for aurochs and reindeer etc and this goes for lascow as as much as any other example of caber now this is no different to the first writing if you like in pre-dynastic suma when you have a symbol for a sheep and marks that indicate 10, you know, 10 sheep. Tristan promises to give all 10 sheep in six months time, something like that. So we suspect that they're doing is they're recording when that particular animal, horse, reindeer or whatever, is mating in the area, in the area of the cave, or is giving birth

in that area. And those are the two great periods in which you get all of those stampedes like you see in the Hall of the Bulls. You get the animals together in a predictable location. They're preoccupied they're relatively easy pickings but this is where lasco is so important and it's not so much these marks which are the numbers with them but it's the art itself because and this is why lasco is so important in understanding how Ice Age people thought.

As the late Norbert Augelat was able to show, over 20 years of study underground at Lascaux, that all the three main animals were drawn in a sequence. It was horse first, then aurochs and then deer. So when you get superimposition position the horse are always the earliest then aurochs and then red deer and so on they're all drawn in their best coats you know their sunday best as i joked earlier and therefore that's rutting they're all shown in rutting and their behaviors like the stampede you know know, are all aggressive, the deer have got their stag antlers and so on. You know, it's clearly these animals depicted rutting and based

on modern analogies, they depict in three distinct seasons, spring, summer and autumn. So we have in Lascaux a calendar of rutting of these animals so the only thing possibly missing is winter why is that well if you look at the archaeology in lascoe's cave mouth they're eating exclusively reindeer and it's dated reindeer remains butchered reindeer remains that give us the age of the site we know on the basis of the seasonality information these bones show is that Lascaux was being occupied and therefore decorated in winter. The only season that's not depicted

in this grand calendar of creation on its walls. Why is that? Because it doesn't need to be created. The humans are there and it's an installation art. This is how we have to think of cave art. You are there. That's why they don't really depict humans, because the humans are there. They're participating in it.

So the whole year is represented. It's a great celebration of how these critical animals come into the world at what of year, and how humans borrow those resources in order to survive. Paul, it is so amazing to start to understand, to get this insight into how important the site of Lascaux is into understanding life in the Ice Age for these people that were living here some 20,000 years ago. I must admit earlier, when you were talking about all of the efforts that went into creating the art itself, whether maybe you see here something similar to, I don't know, maybe building a stone circle in Orkney or somewhere like that, where the whole making of the arts, the whole process of creating it could have been

as important as its final product. However, it does seem here from all of this stuff that with people living in the cave, with these marks being so important to their lives, that actually maybe the final purpose is more important than the creating itself. Yeah. And do you know, I'm so glad that you said that because it's one of the things I always tell students, all of the understandable publicity that Göbekli Tepe and other sites get in Turkey, you know, 11,000, 12,000 year old megalithic sites with art on them and so on, obviously of great importance. But if you remove the fact that a lot of quarrying, well, localized carving of stone has gone on to creating these, not to be dismissed, of course.

But if you just ignore that, there's no difference in complexity between these early Neolithic, megalithic sites and Lascaux 10,000 years earlier. So I think we really need, obviously, to get away from these notions that hunter-gatherers are happy-go-lucky, egalitarian bands of fairly dim hunter-gatherers, you know, and recognize them as such. We wouldn't say, look at 19th century Australian Aborigines or Pacific Coast Kwakittal or, you know, Nenets reindeer herders and say, well, they're pretty simple. You know, so we have to reinstate and recognise the values that we hold dear as civilisation and recognise that certainly the creators of Lascaux were no different at all. Last but certainly not least, I mean, let's talk about the site today in the 21st century. As you mentioned, it's one of many incredible cave art sites. We haven't mentioned Chauvet or Altamira, that'll be for another day. But the team there, they have created this amazing reconstruction of the cave that you can go and see. It's stunning. Yeah, that's right.

So obviously the cave itself has been closed in fact even to our specialists from the 1960s because there's lots of problems as you say with bacterial growth and so on lots of threats to the arts the last thing we want is people traipsing in and breathing all over it and you know causing those algae and bacteria to grow so the french authorities built what was at its time in the 70s a really great 3d replica of it and that was lasco 2 a smaller number was done at lasco 3 but i think what you're thinking of is the terrific lasco 4 which has been done to millimeter precision which you can now visit in the lasco visitor center it really is stunning and does justice uh to the site so uh it's not

parts of it are like you're in the cave other parts are if you're looking at a particular wall or ceiling of the cave but from the comfort of a nice warm airy visitor center which has various other things as well so it actually is speaking as a specialist as well as a somebody trying to proselytize about the the paleolithic more generally it's well worth going to see because it will give you a beautiful sense of what the art actually looks like. And if you think most of our views of these things are on a flat screen or a flat book, coffee table book, it's very important to see how the 3D topography of the cave walls brings that out.

So the Lascaux for the visitor centre is just well worth soaking up. Many a good hour has been spent there. Paul, this has been awesome. Is there anything else that you'd like to quickly mention about Lascaux before we finished? All I would say, I guess,

and I'm not on commission, is Norbert Ogierlas' massive Thames and Hudson book, The Splendour of Lascaux, should be on every self-respecting archaeologist's coffee table or bookshelves. I'm sure it's available in all good bookshops too. Paul, it just goes to me to say thank you so much for taking the time to come back on the podcast today. My pleasure. And I hope it won't be the last time.

Well, there you go. There was Professor Paul Pettit giving you a tour explaining all about the prehistoric wonder that is Lascaux Cave and its Ice Age art. I hope you enjoyed today's episode. Always a pleasure getting Paul on the podcast. He is such a fantastic speaker. So I hope you enjoyed listening to it as much as I did recording it. Last thing from me, wherever you're listening to the Ancients podcast, whether that be Apple Podcasts or Spotify or another service, make sure that you click the follow button that you don't miss out when we release new episodes twice every week. But that's enough from me and I will see you in the next episode.