HISTORIC CAVES

Waikato Independent, Volume XLIV, Issue 6100, 10 September 1947, Page 8

HISTORIC CAVES

CIVILISATION FLOURISHED AND DIED HERE SEALED AWAY FOR CENTURIES

Between fifteen and thirty thousand years ago the village of Les Eyzies in South-west France was Paris, writes Frederick Laws in the “News Chronicle,” London. In the caves of the valleys of the Dordogne and the Vezere more than one civilisation flourished and died. The earliest editions of homo sapiens lived there in labyrinths of limestone reaching deep into the hills, together with the cave bear and. other uncomfortable creatures.

Sealed away for centuries by ice and earth, these galleries and vaults, with their chill air, their stalactites and their underground rivers, give up to the burrowing scholar scraps of evidence of the struggles and achievements of a race of hunters who were also artists.

Out of the bones of animals, the broken skulls of men, signs of fire, and tools of flint and bone in successive layers of earth the prehistorian makes his thin and broken story.

But every now and again a cave is found with etchings or paintings or sculptures which startle the imagination and are apt to spoil the theories of the historians. There are the etchings of mammoths, reindeer, tigers and cattle at Les Combarelles and the polychrome paintings of Font de Gaume—- both near Les Eyzies. And we know that Magdalenian man was a considerable painter because a fox went to earth at Altamira in Spain. The richest find yet was made in September, 1940, by two boys and a dog who climbed the hills above Montignac past vineyards and into a firwood on a property called Lascauxi Here the dog fell down a hole made by an uprooted tree, and the boys slid down after him into a national gallery of the art of the Aurignacians. Oldest Known Pictures The experts say the earliest paintings down here may be some 28,000 years old, and the latest may go back a mere 14 to 17,000 years. Nobody is fussy about a few thousand years one way or another, but everyone agrees that these are the oldest known pictures made by man. To visit the Lascaux caves is an exciting and strangely disturbing experience. You go down with a flickering lamp and find yourself in a great oval chamber of yellow rock. The natural architecture of the cave is impressive, and it is not surprising that the experts call one of the passages leading from it “the nave.” As the lamp moves on, great figures of wild oxen on the walls and roof of the main hall loom at 'you. They are in thick black outline—one is 16 ft long—and beside and beneath them are horses, bison and deer in red and black wash.

Many variations in techfiique in painting can be seen in these Caves. Succeeding generations of artists painted over the work of their predecessors of a thousand or so years before. Some of them managed a soft gradation of colour by smudging it on with moss, others hammered their colour in. Some were dainty in the precision with Which they marked in the joints of a youn'g stag, others got an impressionistic effect of movement and force with hard outline marked in with black spots.

The colour, especially some of the red, has Stayed 'as brilliant as if it was done yesterday. Much of it has petrified and is practically indestructible. The work of distant ages has come together as it does in ancient cathedrals.

One cannot play the art critic with thes'e pictures because no mental gymnastics will lift you into an easy understanding of the artists or their purpose. The work is mainly realistic —a local farmer said any of the bulls

would be worth 3000 francs in the modern market—but it is also strange and awe-inspiring.

According to the authorities these caves were holy, and the paintings a part of hunting magic. No bones or evidence of normal habitation has been found in them. All the female animals shown are pregnant and some of the males appear half disembowelled.

Many of the beasts are shown being struck by arrows—one group of three a re‘ each being hit by seven of them, and seven is a magic number. A particularly vivid picture shows a horse falling. ‘ Was it forced to its death over a cliff ?

Over the heads of some animals there are curious symbolic markings which may represent traps or tribal signs, or may just mean that edible prey had better watch but.

Down a bit at the end of a passage is the Queerest picture of all. It shows a woolly rhinoceros, a disemboweled bison, a bird totem stick, and a fallen man. The man is drawn diagramaticUlly as children draw them, and his face has a bird-like beak. It may bfe that ancient man never painted the human face realistically because painting was an aid to killing, We do ’hot know.

Nor do we know the meaning of a mixed beast in the main hall. It has a lion’s head, the legs and tail of a rhinoceros, two straight horns, a queer humped back, and a pregnant body marked with rings. Is it a sort of pantomime horse for the use of sorcerers or a paleolithic liar’s account of the one that got away?