The recent drama, luckily with a happy ending, of the Thai children trapped in a cave has reminded me of a curious corner located in the south of France, a cave with cave paintings whose main singularity is the fact that it is underwater, with the entrance 36 meters deep, being necessary to dive along a narrow tunnel until reaching the chambers where the decorated vaults are. I am referring to the Cosquer Grotto.
Obviously, it wasn't like that before. In the Upper Paleolithic, which is when our ancestors used it, the place was not submerged but at the foot of a ravine overlooking a wide cleared steppe-type area; We must bear in mind that we are talking about a time with a different climate, much colder as it corresponds to the last ice age. In fact, the cave was not even close to the sea but 6 kilometers inland and also 120 meters above the water level.
It was later, during the Holocene (about 10,000 years ago), when temperatures softened, that level increased and the coastline receded until a Mediterranean coast more similar -not equal- to the one we have now was formed. The entrance was covered by the sea, which also penetrated through the main gallery until reaching the cave itself, which is still partially flooded today. That is why it is not visitable; not even for divers, since that passageway is walled with concrete blocks and they are only removed for access by researchers.
But let's go back to the Gravettian, also called the Upper Perigordian, a cultural period of the Upper Palaeolithic in which Cro-Magnon Man used the cave. Not to inhabit it, since, although remains of a bonfire have been found, they did not appear with associated bones or tools, which would indicate that Cosquer Grotto was not lived in but was used as a religious sanctuary, for ritual ceremonies. That is why its interior was decorated with cave paintings whose interpretation I am not going to go into because not even the experts agree and there are many theories, from sympathetic magic to structuralism, through many others.
From that stage, the Gravettian, the main artistic motifs depicted on the walls are hand prints, which were made by placing them on the rock and blowing the paint on it. 65 have been found, some in black and others in red, with a curious singularity:most of them are missing one or several fingers, something that some paleoanthropologists interpret as evidence of ritual mutilations but that others consider to be to make a kind of alphabet of signs. There are also symbols engraved on the stone (crosses, lines, points...) and animal representations, especially horses and deer, although the most striking are the human ones due to their clear sexual component.
Then there are paintings from a second stage, the Solutrean, which together with the previous one is considered revolutionary in terms of the manufacture of stone tools, by applying wooden handles (pine and birch, to be exact) to stone tools, and advances in artistic technique, since it is now when the famous paleolithic statuettes of venus appear. Animal motifs continue to appear, with equids predominating again, but goats, megaceros, bison and aurochs also appearing. In this zoological theme, the marine fauna is especially striking, with seals, penguins, cetacean fish and even jellyfish.
In total, there are nearly five hundred figures (including the engravings) that, in sum, represent the activity of some eight millennia, chronologically located between 27,000 and 19,000 BC, in which Homo sapiens He won the game over the Neanderthal, so the extraordinary pictorial figure of a wounded man preserved in the grotto would not be at all prophetic. Of course, unfortunately, many paintings have been lost due to being under the water level.
A water through which Henri Cosquer was scuba diving in 1985 when he discovered by chance a hole that extended through the rock and, sensing that it might lead to a natural cave, he went into it. Moving his fins carefully to swim in that narrow corridor deprived of light, he covered the 175 meters in length until he came out into a room about 50 meters in diameter that was only half flooded. Sharp stalactites hung from its vault, just as he expected, and he spent some time taking photos without really knowing what he was portraying, since the only light was provided by the flash for a second.
It was in revealing them - things from the pre-digital age - that he got the surprise of his life:he had produced some unmistakably human paintings, as indicated by one of those hands I mentioned earlier. So he returned to that unusual place with some companions to see it calmly and, in effect, that artistic world that had remained hidden for so long opened before them. They were so amazed that they did not inform the authorities but instead returned several times until misfortune struck them.
It happened in 1991, when three of the divers died trapped in the access tunnel. So first the DRASM (Direction des recherches archéologiques sous-marines ) and then the Service régional de l’archéologie They took action on the matter. In September of that same year, an exploration was carried out with the help of l’Archéonaute , a ship of the Ministry of Culture, directed by the French prehistorians Jean Courtin and Jean Clottes. The former had the added bonus of being an expert diver while the latter is a specialist in the Upper Paleolithic and parietal art.
Both dated the paintings to around 20,000 years ago, which made them older even than the Lascaux ones (which is why they look more dynamic, more modern). However, a more detailed study required time and resources, given the difficulties in carrying material, so to avoid more accidents they chose to keep the grotto closed to the public; There was only one exception, the following year, to shoot the film Le Secret de la grotte Cosquer .
In 1994, the long-awaited study of the figures finally began, which would be controversial for a time because some considered the proposed dating date unlikely. The problem was the impossibility of applying the carbon 14 technique, since it was considered that the result would not be reliable with such antiquity (although, in fact, it is used for organic pieces up to 50,000 years old). Now, it was clear that it was not a fake because the paintings were covered with a layer of calcite that could only form over thousands of years. Confirmation was provided in 1998 by the remains of wood and pollen found at the site.
In 2002 another campaign was carried out by Luc Vanrell (an expert diver and underwater photographer of wrecks and famous for discovering the plane with which the writer Saint-Exupéry disappeared). A year later came the third, again directed by Courtin and Clottes. Later, the concrete blocks that closed the entrance were replaced by a steel gate and since then the Cosquer cave sleeps in a preserving lethargy, leaving behind a failed project to provide it with an entrance with an elevator from above.
The latest news is that in 2016 a 3D digital recreation was made with the idea of building a life-size replica so that the public can visit it. In the meantime, you have to make do with walking around Cap Morgiu, where the Calanque de la Triperie is located (the calanques are narrow tongues of rock with vertical walls that jut out into the sea, typical of the Marseille coast); the cavern is below.