"A Mirror of Subterranean Wonders"

by  Alissa J. Rubin

[Art has been an endeavor of humankind almost since their predecessors crawled out of the sea.  Before inventing the wheel, before creating the alphabet, before domesticating animals or discovering agriculture, humans were doing performances and painting on cave walls.  Long before the historical record of our exploits and progress, the story of human beings was told in cave paintings.  New discoveries of and from such ancient finds, even from ones we were already examining, has always fascinated me.  (Just a few days before I prepared this introduction, a new rock structure near Stonehenge in England was found under the ground.  Archeologists are bound to be learning new things about the builders—and the still-mysterious Stonehenge as well—for decades to come.  New interpretations of what happened to the lost colony of Roanoke Island, North Carolina, have been advanced in the past few weeks.  We never stop learning about our own past and the history of the Earth.)  Alissa J. Rubin's “A Mirror of Subterranean Wonders,” originally published in “The Arts” section of the New York Times of 25 April 2015, reports on one of those old discoveries, the 32-36,000-year-old paintings at Chauvet Cave in France.  What she describes is almost as remarkable as the initial discovery in 1992.]

CHAUVET CAVE, France — After the retreat of Neanderthals across the European continent, modern humans made their way to this cave and began to create the first known works of pictorial art: buffalos surging across the rock background, rhinoceroses doing battle, lions searching for mates and dark-maned horses cantering.

Twenty years after these cave paintings were discovered near the Ardèche River in south-central France, they remain closed to the public for preservation’s sake. But on Saturday, a replica built nearby at a cost of $59 million will open, allowing the public to approximate the experience of the cave explorers who found the paintings.

The rock art in the Chauvet cave, created 32,000 to 36,000 years ago, puts flesh and fur and character onto a world previously known largely through fossil remains. Although archaeologists have recorded the impulse to create art in markings on rock and carved beads as far back as 75,000 years ago, the workmanship in these cave paintings is of another order. The subject matter, the animal world, is familiar, creating a remarkable feeling of connection with the distant past. The paintings are among the world’s most celebrated prehistoric artworks, featured in Werner Herzog’s 2011 3-Dmovie, “Cave of Forgotten Dreams.”

“The skill of these artists, the painting, is amazing,” said Jean Clottes, the French archaeologist who first authenticated the cave for France’s Culture Ministry.

“The walls are covered with engravings; the bison here appears to have eight legs — it’s as if he’s running,” Mr. Clottes said, gesturing toward a figure on the rock behind him as he walked through the replica of the cave with journalists before its official opening.

The first step in making the replica was erecting scaffolding and then covering it with a mortar that simulated the rock surface of the original cave. Photographs of the original paintings were projected onto the surface of the newly created rock. Artists led by, among others, Gilles Tosello, an expert in this prehistoric era who is also trained in the plastic arts, painstakingly copied the paintings with the same materials the original artists also used, charcoal made from Sylvester pine trees and ocher paint made from minerals.

While the paintings have been reproduced at the same size as the originals, the replica over all is slightly less than half the size of the 91,000-square-foot Chauvet cave. Kléber Rossillon, the company that manages the replica site, is planning to have groups of up to 30 enter every few minutes with a guide.

Marie Badisa, the Culture Ministry’s curator for the cave, views the Chauvet paintings as “a true conceptual artistic representation.” The sense of movement the artists captured has been described as “prehistoric cinema,” she said as she led four journalists on a rare visit to the original cave.

Like other researchers who have studied the work, she sees the art’s sophistication as a testament that civilization and culture appeared far earlier in human history than was previously thought.

Exploring the original cave requires a 30-minute hike to the foot of the limestone cliffs above the Ardèche River and then up a winding path to a simple rock shelter where visitors, rarely admitted, leave their belongings. At the cave’s entrance, journalists donned coveralls similar to those used in a hospital operating room, special rubber shoes, a helmet equipped with a headlamp, and a harness and belt to attach to the ladders and cables that extend into the cave’s depths. The goal is to protect the cave from contamination by anything on the visitors’ clothes or skin.

Then came the descent through a narrow opening in the rocks. As the air became cool, dark and damp, it was like entering another world. The darkness was encompassing; the light from the headlamps did little to illuminate the rock chamber’s depths, and the walls receded in darkness and shadows. The sounds of dripping water and echoing steps were magnified in this vast blackness.

Headlamps bobbed as the visitors followed metal walkways installed to protect the soft cave floor, with its prints of bear paws and the shallow depressions they dug as sleeping areas where they hibernated. The lamps revealed the cave’s extraordinary beauty: Stalactites and stalagmites sparkled as if crushed diamonds had been mixed with the sandy colored rock. The cave seemed alive, even growing, with new finger-length stalactites forming on many rock surfaces like the thinnest, most delicate of icicles. Those glittering surfaces are more recent than those of the flatter rock where humans drew their images, Ms. Badisa said.

On the walls, lions stalked, and a remarkable owl stared down from a branch, its head turned all the way around so that it was regarding us over its wings. Less familiar were the mammoths — a hairy relative of today’s elephants — and the aurochs, large horned wild cows that are also extinct today. The detailed nature of the drawings suggested how closely entwined the human and animal world must have been, allowing for close observation of the horses’ manes, an owl’s feathers and the black markings on the rhinos’ torsos. The bulk of the bodies and the play of shadow and light are reminiscent of Picasso, and it is hardly surprising that he visited other prehistoric caves and was struck by the paintings’ extraordinary life.

Of the more than 1,000 creatures inventoried on the walls of the Chauvet cave, just one appears to be human: a woman with the head of a bison, suggesting to some archaeologists that the cave was used for shamanistic practices. There are also several images of vulvas, presumably a tribute to the power to give birth.

Caves with remarkable prehistoric paintings have been discovered across southern France and northern Spain. The two most famous are at Lascauxin southwestern France and Altamira in northern Spain, but the paintings there are less than half as old as those at Chauvet.

The site at Lascaux, discovered in 1940, was initially open to the public but was closed in 1963 after tragic damage to the paintings by carbon dioxide from the breath of hundreds of thousands of visitors each year. The air entering from outside allowed fungi and algae to gain a foothold, also obscuring the original drawings. Cleaning them would cause further damage. The Lascaux experience prompted Mr. Clottes, the archaeologist, to advise the French government immediately after the discovery of the Chauvet cave to close it and secure the entrance.

Altamira was closed in 2002 for fear of damage, but Spanish cultural officials began experimenting with allowing very small groups of people to enter again last year. Both sites also rely on adjacent museums with replicas to give the public a sense of what is inside.

The Chauvet cave’s discovery came in late December 1994, when Jean-Marie Chauvet, Éliette Brunel-Deschamps and Christian Hillaire, all experienced cavers, were exploring the limestone cliffs just above the Ardèche River and found an opening that they thought might lead to an underground chamber. They squeezed through, and as Ms. Brunel-Deschamps took in her surroundings, she cried out, “They have been here!”

Who “they” were is an irresistible question to anyone who sees this art.

Archaeologists have pondered how and why early man used the cave. Geologists and paleontologists have helped to date not just the paintings but the other artifacts found in the cave’s chambers, including bones, mostly of the bears that shared the space with humans, and the charred wood and ashes of fires that the artists made to create the charcoal they used on the walls. There have been academic disputes about the exact dating of the cave as well as different hypotheses about the purpose of the decorations.

Inevitably, the replica does not reproduce the original cave’s air of mystery and grandeur or the sense of a profound encounter with the past. But the copied paintings capture the spirit of the originals, bringing the animals to life as they pace gracefully and powerfully across the rock, a tribute to the eternal drive of artists to capture life.

[Alissa J. Rubin began covering the Middle East for the New York Times in 2007.  In August 2007, she was named the Times’ deputy Baghdad bureau chief.  Currently, she’s the paper’s bureau chief in Paris.  Previously, she had been a correspondent for the Los Angeles Times.]