Doing My Homework

My final cave exploration was another fascinating look at the hearts and minds of our prehistoric ancestors. Each time I think it can't possibly get better  - yet it does!  My visit to Les Combarelles was interesting because it a) demonstrated the animation and value in the art similar to that in nearby Font de Gaume, b) it was among the earliest representations of human forms (including a face!), and c) it forced me - once agin - to listen hard to the French guide and try and make sense of the words. To her credit, Christine paused to check in with me and see if I understood. When it was clear I lost something in translation, we collaborated to make sense of the work. We were a very small group and that's by design. No more than 80 people are allowed in any given day. That is the limit scientists and historians believe allows access while still preserving the work for future generations.

Our group consisted of a French couple and their two sons, Christine and myself. Good thing it was a small group because it quite cozy in the cave. We learned that the original height of the cave was about 1 meter, which meant that Cro-Magnon painters needed to crawl in on hands and knees to leave their mark. It has since been excavated so modern humans can walk in, but it starts to put the work in context. This work was really never meant to be seen by others - it was placed in crevices that you needed to look for. Some of the etchings and paintings made purposeful use of contours of the cave and like de Gaume, placement and play of light made the figures look animated. Many of these figures are superimposed and use the same lines to create two different animals. For example, the arcing head of a mammoth also serves as the hind quarters for a wild horse and natural indentations in the cave wall provide places where eyes, mouths and ears can be formed. In other places, only through the use flight do the animals reveal themselves - an ibex, a bear and in one stunning case, a lion. These artists commanded line and light to create figures that while sometimes required a laser pointer to follow the calcite covered forms, were there as if scratched in only a few years ago as opposed to 15,000 years ago.

The other fascinating engravings were those of humans themselves. But there are very few whole human forms in any of the caves. Historians believe it is because people, as a form, were not nearly as important as the natural world around them, the world that fed them, sheltered them, even hunted them. It was to be revered. There are hints of legs, a face, hands, but mostly there are many representations of, um, female body parts (gotta keep this blog rated G for the kiddies!). You can check in with me offline for more details. Christine suggested that the men who left these marks revered the life giving power of women and they held a special place in prehistoric clan life. Of course, she added, that was her opinion as a historian - and a woman! I spent the rest of the day at the PIP (Pole de le International Prehistoire), a center designed to orient visitors to the treasures of Les Eyzies and the region. The building itself is very modernist, white, clean lines and kind of sterile, but inside a treasure trove of research.

I was able to learn more about the Neanderthals who called Dordogne home and how they slowly gave way to homo sapiens (Cro-magnon). PIP presents them in the fully rehabilitated way - not the slow-witted, club-wielding primitives of cartoons and even scholarly journals just a generation ago. Instead, they present them as living in tight clans, makers of sophisticated tools (including biface spear points), artists who used earth pigment paints, and people who took time to bury their dead. They even look more like us! Of course, no one knows for sure but the artifacts and evidence left behind point to a more advanced form of hominid than most of us could have imagined. I'm even more eager to get to the Neanderthal Museum and find our how much is fact, how much is fiction and how much is just not known.