Our October 28 Pause-Déjeuner was presented by Erik Trinkaus, a retired professor of paleoanthropology who, as he put it, “spent a half-century working on human remains from the Pleistocene.” Now an AFLCR board member, he gave us a detailed account of the work at the Grotte de Cussac Paleolithic cave site in southwestern France.
Paleolithic cave art, he explained, dates from about 32,000 to 12,000 years ago. Researchers have been studying it for more than 100 years, trying to glean an understanding of early humans and how they and their culture changed over time. But even after all that study, we still know little about how and why our Paleolithic ancestors created cave art. What did they intend for the images to mean or to symbolize? Did individuals create the artwork as a form of personal expression, or was it conjoined with ritual for a social purpose? Why is the art located so deep within caves, up to a kilometer from the entrance? To these and other questions, we simply have no answers. Most interpretations that researchers make, Trinkaus cautioned, are projections from our own cultures.
Trinkaus recounted how he, as part of a multinational team of more than 80 researchers from different specialties, studied the Grotte de Cussac, a cave that had been formed by an ancient river that meandered through limestone and carved out a mile-long channel. Thirty thousand years ago, its walls became surfaces for cave art. The cave was rediscovered only twenty-two years ago by a local caver, who immediately called the authorities. Today the study of caves proceeds with far more caution and technological sophistication than in the past. The international team worked accordingly, carrying out its laborious work within a tightly constrained space, in darkness illuminated only by headlamps, and limited to only two months of the year. They could not study many of the objects or artwork directly but had to photograph
them and then use photogrammetry to analyze the images.
The Cussac artwork is 12,000 years older than that of Lascaux and many other sites, with their famous paintings of bulls and horses. But unlike the artwork at those sites, Cussac’s consists solely of engravings, some 600 in all—there are no paintings and only a few small marks of applied color.
Creating these engravings clearly required extraordinary determination on the part of Paleolithic artists, as Trinkaus explained. The artists would have ventured along a narrow passageway bearing torches. They wore footwear, probably of soft leather, as their footprints suggest. When they reached a point deep in the cave, they used stone and antler tools to carve images of animals onto the cave walls: bison, a mammoth, an ibex with horns, the hindquarters of cattle, the hooves of horses. They carved deep into the limestone, exerting great pressure with their strokes. They rendered most of the creatures in outline, although one mammoth’s form is filled in with shallow lines indicating shaggy fur. Some of the engravings are simple, while others are more complex. Many overlap, superimposed on one another. Some are in places where it would have been a stretch for the artist to reach.
The cave artists also carved representations of humans, all female. These figures have the prominent breasts, large buttocks, and abdominal bulge typical of well-known Paleolithic figurines like the “Venus” of Willendorf. The stomach bulge could represent pregnancy, but we can’t even be sure of that: the skin folds are so depicted as to be consistent with obesity. Yet these hunting-gathering people lived in scarcity, so obesity is hard to account for.
That is just one of the many question that the artists left behind them, along with a handful of tools, when they disappeared into prehistory.
For members of the team studying the engravings, the main challenges were to distinguish the images from one another, to disentangle them, even to count them, as well as identify the subject. What sequence were they made in? The inferences they drew were based on hard evidence, not projection, and they all recognized that their answers would necessarily be limited.
Uniquely among Paleolithic caves, the Cussac site contains not only cave art but also human remains, which are contemporaneous with the art. Found in three locations inside the cave, one of them is whole skeleton of one individual. Those in a second place were likely brought in from outside, in baskets, and nestled in bear hibernation hollows. In the third locality, body parts appear to have been separated. “Something complex was going on here,” said Trinkaus, noting the complexity of funerary rituals at the time of Cussac.
While the absence of answers is disappointing, the power of the images themselves remains remarkable. In his presentation, Trinkaus lingered over the dorsal or back line of a certain bison and noted that it was created with a single stroke, uninterrupted. Yet it is a couple of meters long—enormous. Many years ago when I was an aspiring printmaker, I tried to engrave with a stylus on small copper plates, and I found that to be a struggle. Here was an elegant and expressive line, carved deep into stone, high up on a wall, extending for over ten meters—in a single stroke! Creating such a line would have required great skill, practice, and eye-hand coordination. That feat alone speaks volumes about the powerful driving force of our species’ artistic imagination. As impressive as the artworks must have been to the artists’ contemporaries, they remain astonishing even millennia later to their descendants.
–Janet Biehl
Public Lectures in French on the Grotte de Cussac:
Jacques Jaubert, “La Grotte Ornée et Sépulcrale de Cussac (Dordogne),” 2018, at
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1YmCkCtkMCE
Jacques Jaubert, “Cussac. Une Grotte Ornée et Sépulcrale en Dordogne,” 2020, at
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J8bFVSBIlTg
A book on the Grotte de Cussac:
Jacques Jaubert, Valerie Feruglio, and Natalie Fromintin. Grotte de Cussac – 30 000. Bordeaux: Éditions Confluences, 2020.
