Still, I’m fond of our capacity for wonder. I give it three and a half stars.
LASCAUX CAVE PAINTINGS
IF YOU’VE EVER HAD OR BEEN A CHILD, you are probably already familiar with hand stencils. They were the first figurative art made by both my kids—somewhere between the ages of two and three, my children spread the fingers of one hand out across a piece of paper, and then with the help of a parent traced their five fingers. I remember my son’s face as he lifted his hand and looked absolutely shocked to see the shape of his splayed fingers still on the paper, a semipermanent record of himself.
I am extremely happy that my children are no longer three, and yet to look at their little hands from those early artworks is to be inundated with a strange, soul-splitting joy. Those pictures remind me that my kids are not just growing up but also growing away from me, running toward their own lives. But I am applying that meaning to their hand stencils, and the complicated relationship between art and its viewers is never more fraught than when we look deeply into the past.
In September of 1940, an eighteen-year-old mechanic named Marcel Ravidat was walking in the southwestern French countryside, when his dog, Robot, disappeared down a hole. （Or so the story goes, anyway.*） When Robot returned, Ravidat thought the dog might’ve discovered a rumored secret passageway to the nearby Lascaux Manor.
And so a few days later, he returned with some rope and three friends—sixteen-year-old Georges Agniel, fifteen-year-old Jacques Marsal, and thirteen-year-old Simon Coencas. Georges was on summer vacation and would soon return to Paris for the school year. Jacques, like Marcel, was a local. And Simon, who was Jewish, had sought refuge with his family in the countryside amid the Nazi occupation of France.
That day, Agniel later remembered, “We descended with our oil lamps and went forward. There were no obstacles. We went through a room and then by the end we found ourselves in front of a wall and saw that it was full of drawings. We immediately understood we were in a prehistoric cave.”
Simon Coencas recalled, “With my little gang . . . we were hoping to find a treasure. We found one, but not the one we thought.”
In the cave, they discovered over nine hundred paintings of animals—horses, stags, bison, and also species that are now extinct, including a woolly rhinoceros. The paintings were astonishingly detailed and vivid, with red, yellow, and black paint made from pulverized minerals that were likely blown through a narrow tube—possibly a hollowed bone—onto the walls of the cave. It would eventually be established that these artworks were at least seventeen thousand years old. One of the boys recalled that in the flickering of their oil lamps, the figures seemed to be moving, and indeed, there is some evidence that the artists’ drawing techniques were intended to convey a kind of flip-book animation by torchlight.*
Just days after the cave’s discovery, Simon Coencas and his family, fearing the growing Nazi presence in the countryside, moved again—this time to Paris, where relatives had promised to help hide them. But the family was betrayed by a business partner, and Simon’s parents were murdered by the Nazis. Simon was imprisoned for a time, but narrowly escaped the death camps and survived the rest of the war hiding in a tiny attic room with his siblings. He would not see his three friends from that Lascaux summer for forty-six years.
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So there were four boys who discovered the cave, but only two who could remain there—Jacques and Marcel. They were both so profoundly moved by the paintings that all through that fall and winter, they camped outside the cave to protect it. They only left after a reinforced door was installed at the cave’s entrance. In 1942, Jacques and Marcel joined the French Resistance together. Jacques was captured and sent to a prison camp, but both survived the war, and when they got home, they both immediately returned to the cave.
After World War II, the French government took ownership of the site, and the cave was opened to the public in 1948. Marcel and Jacques both served as tour guides. When Pablo Picasso saw the cave paintings on a visit that year, he reportedly said, “We have invented nothing.”
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The cave is not particularly large—only about ninety meters deep—but it contains nearly two thousand paintings. Aside from the animals, hundreds of abstract shapes are painted on the walls, most commonly red and black circles.
What might these symbols mean? We can’t know. There are so many mysteries at Lascaux: Why, for instance, are there no paintings of reindeer, which we know were the primary source of food for the Paleolithic humans who lived in that cave? Why is the human form so rarely depicted?* Why are certain areas of the cave filled with images, including pictures on the ceiling that required the building of scaffolding to create, while other areas have only a few paintings? And were the paintings spiritual? Here are our sacred animals. Or were they practical? Here is a guide to some of the animals that might kill you.
At Lascaux, there are also some “negative hand stencils,” as they are known to art historians. These paintings were created by pressing one hand with fingers splayed against the wall of the cave, and then blowing pigment, leaving the area around the hand painted. Similar hand stencils have been found in caves around the world. We’ve found memories of hands from up to forty thousand years ago from Indonesia to Australia to Africa to the Americas. These hand stencils remind us of how different life was in the distant past—amputations, likely from frostbite, were common in Europe, and so you often see negative hand stencils with three or four fingers. Life was difficult and often short: As many as a quarter of women died in childbirth, and around 50 percent of children did not live to the age of five.
But the hand stencils also remind us that humans of the past were as human as we are. Their hands were indistinguishable from ours. More than that, we know they were like us in other ways. These communities hunted and gathered, and there were no large caloric surpluses, so every healthy person would have had to contribute to the acquisition of food and water—and yet somehow, they still made time to create art, almost as if art isn’t optional for humans.
We see all kinds of hands—child and adult—stenciled on cave walls around the world, but almost always the fingers are spread, like my kids’ hand stencils. I’m no Jungian, but it’s fascinating and a little strange that so many Paleolithic humans, who couldn’t possibly have had any contact with one another, created the same types of paintings using similar techniques—techniques that we are still using to paint hand stencils.
But then again, what the Lascaux art means to me is likely different from whatever it meant to the people who made it. The paeloanthropologist Genevieve von Petzinger has theorized that the abstract dots and squiggles found in cave paintings may have been an early form of written language, with a consistent set of meanings even across broad distances.
What was the motivation for the negative hand stencils? Perhaps they were part of religious rituals, or rites of passage. Some academics theorize that the hand stencils were part of hunting rituals. Or maybe the hand is just a convenient model situated at the end of the wrist. To me, though, the hand stencils say, “I was here.” They say, “You are not new.”
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The Lascaux cave has been closed to the public for many years now—too many people breathing inside of it led to the growth of mold and lichens, which has damaged some of the art. Just the act of looking at something can ruin it, I guess. The cave’s tour guide discoverers, Marcel Ravidat and Jacques Marsal, were among the first people to note the impact of contemporary humans on the ancient human art.