Representation of a bison in the Spanish cave of Altamira • ISTOCKPHOTO It was too incredible to be true:“The Altamira painter's technique includes the following elements:linear perspective, aerial perspective, colors diluted in water or grease, brush. Could Paleolithic people have painted these bison? In no way. “Let us not look in another early art for paintings similar to those of Altamira. This is what Francisco Quiroga and Rafael Torres, professors at the Free Institute of Education in Madrid, wrote after visiting the cave in 1880. Like many researchers, they were convinced that it was a deception. Marcelino Sanz de Sautuola had unearthed these paintings the previous year, and no one then considered that the "primitive" man could be the author. But during the 1890s, the discovery of paintings and engravings in several caves in France forced skeptics to admit their authenticity. Today, Altamira is one of Spain's most remarkable contributions to the World Heritage Site. More broadly, these are universal images, which have become emblematic of the first representatives of our species, Homo sapiens, and primitive arts. A colder and wetter climate Altamira Cave is 270m long and has several offshoots. In one of the rooms, near the entrance, is the famous set of polychrome bison. The different sections are rectangular, measuring between 2 and 12 m high and between 6 and 20 m wide; all are decorated with animal figures and drawn or engraved signs. The last part consists of a narrow tunnel 1.50 m high and wide, rich in signs and figures, including some strange masks. 15,500 years ago, the entire ceiling of the first meters of the vestibule having collapsed, the cave was sealed and remained concealed until the 19th th century. Altamira is near the small town of Santillana del Mar, on top of a hill, 156 m high. The hill dominates a territory with soft and varied relief where the Saja river flows. Harvested meadows, hedgerows and small groups of trees form a green mosaic dotted with huts and houses, between the coast 5 km away and the coastal plains 10 km away. A landscape totally different from that of the Upper Paleolithic, in the time of Altamira. Also read:Cosquer, a cave emerging from the waters This period begins 40,000 years ago with the arrival of Homo sapiens in Europe to end 10,000 years ago with the end of the glaciations and the transition to the current period, the Holocene. In Cantabria, the climate was colder and more humid than today; on the coastal fringe, the landscape was characterized by a meadow dotted with forests depending on the relief, the orientation and the rivers. The vegetation provided food for animals that no longer exist, such as the mammoth and the aurochs, similar to a large bull; others who now live in very distant regions, such as reindeer and bison; and others still living in our latitudes such as deer, horse and goat. Climate, relief, flora and fauna formed an appropriate environment for these human groups who fed themselves through hunting, fishing and the gathering of plants. Art in the dark The cave vestibule, near the entrance, was inhabited for much of the Upper Paleolithic, and the groups that settled there carved, drew and painted animals and signs as they moved into the interior of the cave. Throughout this time, these communities carved and used flint, bone and horn objects identical to those employed throughout Europe, with a few more local creations such as the scapulae of stags featuring carved deer figures made in the Magdalenian. More than 35,000 years ago, a human being sunk into the half-light with ocher and water and, with his fingers, traced several parallel curves forming a 60 cm sign on the ceiling at the polychrome, several thousand years before the hands of other men painted the bison on this same ceiling. During the Aurignacian, animals were carved from mammoth ivory and music was played on flutes made from bird bones in caves in Germany; in France, lions and other animals are painted in charcoal in the Chauvet Cave; 12,000 km away, in Indonesia, animals, hands and signs painted in red ocher have been found in a cave in Sulawesi. Thus, the oldest known art is expressed as a complete, evolved art, presenting a great technical, thematic, stylistic and conceptual diversity. Enigmatic red signs At Altamira, after this red sign and several engravings, in the Gravettian and the Solutrean – between 22,000 and 26,000 years ago – hands and series of dots are painted, and the ceiling is peopled with red horses. Several horses rear up and two seem to face each other, dressed like jealous males fighting over a mare. The painters of this period left us an even more enigmatic legacy. Further inside the cave, a crevice 1m wide and 5m long is studded with red signs; on the upper part is a sign composed of four cloisonné ovals. At 1 m in height, on the lower part of a cornice is painted a red sign 3 m long and almost 50 cm wide, formed of long parallel lines intersecting with transverse lines. You have to squat or lie on the ground to see them in their entirety, and the narrowness of the space does not allow more than two people to contemplate them. In the Magdalenian, between 20,000 and 15,500 years ago, the whole cave was filled with carved hinds and stags; males have multi-pointed antlers, erect head and open mouth:they bray during the rut in autumn. In the last gallery are large reticulated oval motifs (evoking a net), as well as masks:simple lines forming eyes, a nose or a mouth are traced in charcoal on natural roughness. Time of the bison Then, the ceiling was occupied by the polychrome bison. Several of them were created from large natural bulges that fit into the figure giving volume to the body or part of it (the chest or the head). They were painted black and red with pieces of charcoal and ocher acting as pencils or chalk, or with mineral powder diluted in water. The red paint completely covers the rock except for areas forming a sharp line that separates and distinguishes the legs from the body and brings depth and volume to the figures. The infiltration and condensation of water on the paintings dissolved the pigments, which fell to the ground, giving glimpses of the rock under the color of the silhouettes, the latter fading and forming a glaze; however, this is not the painter's technique, but the result of natural degradation. It is therefore the water that transformed these representations into polychrome figures which, initially, were bichrome red and black. The painters of Altamira knew how to exploit the natural projections of the wall to paint the bellies of certain animals there and thus give them relief. Bison are motionless, lying on the ground and ruminating, or hunched over and turning their heads; they are adult males and females. Is it a herd or a scene? Like the deer, the European bison, which survives in the forests of Poland and Russia, groups together in herds during the rut for reproduction. These figures may represent fertility or maturity. Let us remember that, in our societies, the passage to adulthood and reproduction give rise to certain rituals, such as those, profane or sacred, which nowadays accompany the transition to majority and weddings. With the bison, and in these two colors, two horses are represented as well as a doe whose belly coincides with a natural projection of the wall, as if it were full. Is this the same theme again? The later bison were drawn in charcoal by pressing down to trace the black lines of the outlines, legs or certain details like the eyes and the muzzle, and with a lighter hand or by spreading to obtain the gray tones of the chest and the croup and give volume to the shape. They are charcoal drawings, a technique that will be somewhat forgotten after Altamira before reappearing… in the Renaissance. Artists used their dexterity to faithfully depict the form and attitudes of animals, and so it seems appropriate to call Paleolithic art naturalistic. Alongside figures clearly linked to the world of nature, there are abstract, elongated or reticulated forms. It can be assumed that these human groups knew and shared what these figures represented, the thoughts or ideas related to them, the stories associated with them. A link between art and nature Why were these cave paintings made? If we cannot question their authors, we have a major lead:the choice of the rock, its shape, its relief and its crevices, such and such a detail of the wall or the ceiling. This fusion between rock and paint is more than a characteristic detail of parietal art:it is an intentional gesture that closely unites nature and plastic, symbolic creation. This is the case with the bison of Altamira, which are painted on large natural bulges and whose outlines are traced by the asperities of the rock. Thus, rock art gives us to see the union of life and inert rock, the link between the created figures and their natural model, between art and nature. This expression can also be linked to the animism of hunter-gatherer societies, which personifies elements of nature, endowed with intelligence and will. Also read:Venus of the Palaeolithic, these intriguing shameless statuettes As opposed to rational or scientific knowledge, art is a form of emotional knowledge and social expression, which was perhaps then used to understand and explain nature and man's place in it. Whoever designed the masks in the most remote part of Altamira gave a face to those who were there, half hidden in reality, in that part of nature that groups of hunter-gatherers know of because think it, imagine it or dream it. A cave dedicated to shamanism? Those who fashioned these beings on the stone or the bison on the ceiling, who created these images, were perhaps intermediaries between the group and the other nature beings. Intermediaries such as Siberian shamans:Paleolithic art has been hypothesized to be the embodiment of the imaginary journey resulting from shamanic ecstasy, during which the shaman comes into contact with the spirit world. Mediators like priests, people who enjoyed great prestige, guardians of the mythical thought of their community. Paleolithic art offers a concrete bestiary, a repertoire of images that must have been linked to an oral tradition, to stories of a mythical nature, which would explain its coherence and presence in the European landscape for millennia. This art seems to have bequeathed to us the icons of a code, but without any of the words accompanying these images and without leaving traces of the code. 10,000 years ago, the climatic changes of the Holocene altered the lives of hunter-gatherers and relegated the art of caves to oblivion. The caves of Paleolithic Europe then ceased to be a space of myths and ancient rites to become simple caverns again. Find out more • What is prehistoric art? , P. Paillet, CNRS Éditions, 2021.• Birth of life. A reading of parietal art, M. Lorblanchet, Rouergue, 2020. Creation versus evolution Marcelino Sanz de Sautuola discovered Altamira when nothing similar had been seen, and published the results of his research in 1880:it is Paleolithic art. It presents irreproachable scientific data and arguments, but prehistorians do not accept that such an ancient art is of such magnitude and quality, which would be incompatible with the evolution of the human line. On the other hand, the creationists, for whom the biblical account of Creation is an indisputable dogma, accept without hesitation the antiquity of Altamira, seeing in it the proof that God created man a few thousand years earlier by endowing him with intellectual and artistic faculties. It was not until the discovery of several caves adorned with Paleolithic art in France that Altamira and Sautuola won everyone's recognition. The marrow lamp So how did the painters inside Altamira light up? Pedro Saura and Matilde Múzquiz, specialists in prehistoric art and neocave painters, used archaeological findings to produce light as it did 15,000 years ago, using animal bone marrow as fuel and making a wick with tangled dry grass blades. Faces in the rock At the bottom of the Altamira cave, in the "ponytail", reliefs of the rock are transformed into elongated heads of animals or, smaller, into human faces. These are what paleontologists have called "masks". All it takes is a few touches of black and the play of shadow and light from the lamp to suggest eyes, eyebrows or a muzzle, for blurred faces to emerge. Charcoal and light – an artifice skilfully controlled by man – are sufficient to make clear what was underlying in the rock, to enter into a relationship with other beings and other realities. This ability to make the invisible visible allows us to qualify those who painted and engraved in Altamira as priests – shamans, mediators, intermediaries (officiants in short) – who, to fulfill their office, needed to master artistic techniques. They thus transformed inert matter, rock, into living matter. • María Justina Sanz de Sautuola y Escalante (1870-1946), who had discovered the bison paintings of Altamira, was visited in 1902 by the French prehistorian Émile Cartailhac, anxious to apologize for having denied the authenticity of the paintings – a position shared by the majority of the scientific community.• The French archaeologist Gabriel de Mortillet influenced the refusal to admit the authenticity of the Altamira paintings discovered by Émile Cartailhac:it would be a maneuver by the Spanish Jesuits "to be able to harm too credulous paleoethnologists", and thereby underline the lack of rigor of prehistorians.• The French engineer Édouard Harlé, sent to Altamira by the IX th international congress of prehistoric anthropology and archeology held in 1880, visited the cave and in 1881 published a report denying the authenticity of the paintings, thus contributing to the cave being forgotten and to the discredit of Marcelino de Sautuola.• Between 1890 and 1901, the caves of La Mouthe, Combarelles, Pair-non-Pair, Mas-d'Azil and Font-de-Gaume were discovered in France. All of them contain Paleolithic art, thus confirming the existence of human beings who, thousands of years ago, as in Altamira, bequeathed a striking artistic testimony of the Ice Age.
