Prehistoric Caves as Emotion Picture Theaters Prehistoric Caves as Emotion Picture TheatersA primal form of theatrical and cinematic performances emerged in certain caves, 32,000 to 11,000 years ago, during the Ice Age or “Upper Paleolithic Period,” as evidenced by paintings and etchings on the walls, musical instruments, and other artifacts.1 One of the earliest, with some of the finest art, is shown in Werner Herzog’s 3D documentary film, Cave of Forgotten Dreams (2010). It explor es prehistoric art in the Chauvet (or Pont d’Arc) cave in France, which was discovered in 1994 and is off-limits to the public. This chapter considers Herzog’s film and the Chauvet cave, plus details from lesser-known caves in France and Spain, which I visited in June 2011.2 (A detailed reproduction of the Chauvet cave opened recently to the public and I visited it, along with Grottes d’Arcy, in July 2015.) Such caves offer evidence of a primal form of performance with theatrical and cinematic elements: the evolution of human subjectivity based in, yet moving beyond mammalian playfulness, through shared emotions, neural filters, and simulations of the Other—with pictures that moved in the flickering firelight within acoustic chambers. How do the cave spaces, along with images made in them, reveal the birth of a distinct sense of human character (like and unlike other animals), using the rock wall as mirror and map for personal and collective visions, as scenery for performance and as screen medium?
In his recent book, Palaeoperformance, and in earlier essays, Yann-Pierre Montelle explores the evidence for many aspects of theatricality in the prehistoric caves of France: not only the paintings, etchings, and carvings on the rock walls, but also the various sizes and shapes of caverns, the bone flutes, scrapers, and bullroarers found in them, and the resonant tones produced today by tapping stalactites of different lengths (Palaeoperformance, “Mimicry,” and “Paleoperformance”). Prior to Montelle, Jean Clottes and David Lewis-Williams developed a theory, based on such evidence, plus neuroscience research and anthropological comparisons with recent African traditions, that prehistoric cave art shows the recording, display, and ritual use of hallucinatory trance experiences, involving animal-spirit guides.3 Ice Age peoples may have produced cave art through visions that occurred spontaneously in the extreme darkness with its echoing sounds, evoked by the flickering fires of torches and animal fat lamps, painful treks deep into the earth, loss of oxygen and increase of other gases, and the rock’s natural shapes and crevices.4 Shamanic drugs might also have been involved. The mysterious geometric lines and dots in prehistoric cave art, along with realistic animal figures and hybrid animal-human creatures, correspond to the types and stages of hallucinatory visions that can be evoked in the laboratory today through sensory deprivation or flashing lights. Such hallucinations, now with objects from our cultural context, are experienced, too, by people with migraines and other disorders. Thus, cave art reveals at least two possibilities of prehistoric theater: (1) visionary experiences of geometric, abstract, and supernatural figures from within a human head projected onto or through the rock surface as an emotional screen medium and (2) shared performances in the cave using the rock art as scenic background, mythic illustrations, and moving characters in the firelight with its shadows.
The types of cave-art spaces also demonstrate various aspects of prehistoric theater. Some are easily accessible in huge chambers. Others are hundreds of meters inside the earth, requiring crouched walking or crawling through narrow passages. In more accessible chambers, processions and large ritual gatherings may have occurred. But for those with tight corridors deep into the darkness, with slippery surfaces, low ceilings, and sudden cliffs, and with bears, hyenas, and lions potentially present, fearful, courageous, and painful ordeals were involved for a few individuals—perhaps shamanic leaders putting initiates through transformative nightmares. Montelle relates this to male initiation rites practiced by various tribes elsewhere in the world historically (“Paleoperformance” 134–36). Combining Montelle’s argument on initiation rites, Clottes and Lewis-Williams’s theory of rock art as a super-natural membrane, and my own experiences underground (and with Herzog’s film), I will give details from specific caves, showing the possible origins of human theatricality in distinctive forms of self/Other awareness.
Herzog’s voiceover, during his documentary film, calls Chauvet a “proto-cinema,” for this cave shows some of the earliest and finest paintings yet discovered, with repeated figures that become animated in flickering light. Some are carbon-dated between 30,000 and 32,000 years old. Various animal figures have three-dimensional shading in the legs, bellies, and heads, sometimes turned toward the viewer, showing a perspective technique long before the Renaissance. There are many overlapping and echoing images, suggesting movement and perhaps scenes of predation (with lions stalking bison and rhinos) or of sparring (with rhinos knocking horns).5 Yet, most of Chauvet’s figures, as in the caves of France and Spain I visited, are floating on the rock surfaces—not tied to contextual scenes or obvious narratives. This emphasizes contrast (Ramachandran’s third neuro-aesthetic law) and indicates very personal, dreamlike visions in the paintings, rather than general representations of reality outside the cave. But the figures may also contain a collective language of symbols and imagery that we can no longer read. They seem to involve Ramachandran’s fourth neuro-aesthetic law, isolation, in stimulating our right parietal and emotional meaning networks, like Cro-Magnon brains tens of thousands of years ago.
The etchings are stunning, too, with detailed images of horses and other large animals cut into the rock, as white outlines against the darker surface layer, while using the natural curves of the walls, like the paintings. (The 3D technology of Herzog’s film enhances the viewer’s experience of this.) Such etchings suggest an immediate artistic impulse—perhaps outlining on the wall the animals and other super-natural figures seen in or through the rock, during shamanic trances. Later, some of the etchings were painted, with black or red outlines, and sometimes with more detailed shadings and interactions, using black charcoal or manganese rock and red or yellow ochre. “Crayon” sticks of such materials and colors have been found in some caves. Mineral pigments were also ground into powder, mixed with liquid, and painted with a brush or sprayed from the mouth, sometimes using bone tubes that have been found. This technology, along with the scaffolding needed to make paintings 5 meters high in caves such as Font-de-Gaume (15,000 years ago), required prior planning and materials collected in or brought into the cave. The carved sculptural reliefs in rock shelters like Abri du Cap Blanc (of horses 15,000 years ago) would have taken even more time and work to produce. Yet, the numerous overlapping engravings in many caves might have been created quickly—in direct response to personal visions—and then shared with others in that form or with further artistic elaborations, showing a spectrum from individual to collective theater experiences.6
Herzog’s film involves interviews with scientists working at Chauvet, including a statement by Jean Clottes that Upper Paleolithic peoples were different from us in their perception of reality as super-natural, with “fluidity” between human, animal, and non-animal forms and with “permeability” between performance spaces, rock walls, and other worlds. And yet, this fluid and permeable context for prehistoric art, akin to our virtual experience of the Chauvet cave in a movie, or other caves in person, suggests a connection with humans tens of thousands of years ago, whose brains were anatomically “modern.” Today, we enter the cinema chamber in near darkness and feel transported through the images on the wall. We add personal associations, memories, and fantasies to the scenes onscreen, while photos on a filmstrip, or digital dots in a video, repeated yet subtly changing, evoke the illusion of moving figures in our heads. With or without 3D technology and glasses, we see much more of a fluid and permeable world in the motion picture theater than is really there—with the images onscreen, the acoustics around us, and the lures of cinematic cuts, moving camera shots, and diegetic framings.
Seeing a photograph of cave art, or a film documentary of Chauvet, does not convey the full experience of being inside a cave with prehistoric theatrical imagery. Yet Herzog’s film illustrates how humans have experienced theater for at least 30,000 years, extending the inner performance spaces of reality perceptions, memories, fantasies, and dreams toward shared artistic, ritual, and entertainment events. The multiple echoing images of horse and lion heads, or of a single repeated head, of rhino head(s) with horn(s) and partial body outline(s), show a movie theater impulse to present various moments together at once, collapsing and yet extending time and space. This also relates to Ramachandran’s law of “orderliness” in the natural alignments and pleasing rhythms of multiple, emotional images.
Regarding the neuro-aesthetic laws of “symmetry” and “metaphor,” as well as rhythmic orderliness, there are chambers in the Chauvet cave, as shown in Herzog’s film, that look like ritualized spaces with a central totem for people to gather around. On a large rounded stalactite, hanging from the center of the rock ceiling, in the deepest cavern that has paintings, are the black outlines of a woman’s legs (no feet) and vulva, akin to carved prehistoric figurines that have been found in Germany, such as the “Venus of Willendorf.”7 Yet there is also a dark, filled-in bison head, just above the vulva and legs, as if emerging from them, or as a bison-man with one leg (and perhaps a human hand) overlapping the woman’s. A lion’s head and body emerge from the other side of the woman’s legs. Around this central stalactite painting are many images on the walls, including vulvas and repeated animal heads. All this indicates that Chauvet was not a prehistoric art gallery, but a theater for gendered, animal-human myths and rites.
Another chamber, which “resembles an amphitheatre,” contains further evidence for ritual performances in Chauvet (Clottes, Chauvet 99). A bear skull placed on a flat rock, which has charcoal on it dated to 30,000 years ago and dozens of bear skulls around it, including one with black lines on it, suggests a staging of life/death, human/animal, predator/ prey meanings.8 Such symmetry and possible metaphors may relate to the many paintings and engravings throughout the cave, as a network of meanings: lions, bears, rhinos, horses, bison, ibexes, reindeer, and mammoths (including one with a thin chest and strangely rounded feet).
Perhaps these artworks were also inspired by the spectacular natural formations of the cave, its huge columns, cake-like layered stalagmite mounds, numerous hanging stalactite needles, and rock curtains glistening with calcite crystals. The Chauvet cave today, like others with prehistoric art in southern France and northern Spain, conveys the sense of a majestic cathedral, with high arches and spires drawing the eye upward, through womb-like openings. Its painted figures may reflect ancestral totem spirits, possessing performers who embodied them for others, as well as the minds of visual artists who left such images—sharing the animal legacies of their inner theaters with us, too, as their future Other.
The Tito Bustillo cave, in the Asturias region of northern Spain, has artwork created over a long stretch of time, from 20,000 to 12,000 years ago, with most of it made 15,000 to 14,000 years ago. There is a chamber, with a very narrow opening, that bears red triangular signs on its walls, perhaps with mythic, performative meanings, like the Chauvet stalactite. This room has been dubbed the “Chamber of Vulvas,” although the mysterious signs look like hoof prints as well. Maybe they reflect a hunter’s imagination, tracking the deer, bison, and horses that are represented in outline or fully shaded forms elsewhere in the cave. The evidence from bones left at campsites shows that the killing and eating of such large animals was a rarity during the Ice Age (Lewis-Williams, Mind 258). Yet, the theory of Henri Breuil, from half a century ago, that the cave art demonstrated an attempt to gain power over such animals, as hunting magic, might have validity here—especially if these were rare and prized game. Indeed, there are black outlines of bison and horses on a red background in Tito Bustillo, which is unusual for Paleolithic cave art.9 The red wash, which was painted first, might represent blood or the living tissue of the animal’s inner body, as experienced by hunters. Inside the legs of some of the figures, red paint also suggests an exploration of musculature, using the natural texture of the rock. Perhaps this involved shamanic performances of animal spirits as well, with the human actor wearing an animal skin and mask, as in many tribal cultures around the world.
The famous cave of Altamira, near Santillana del Mar, about a 90-minute drive east of Tito Bustillo, also has red and black shading within its black outlines of bison, but only a little red wash behind them in some areas. At least, that is my perception from photos10 and a life-size reproduction of Altamira’s main polychrome chamber, since the actual cave is now closed to the public, due to bacterial problems brought into it by twentieth-century visitors, which damaged the art (as in France’s Lascaux cave). The paintings also use natural protrusions in the cave’s ceiling, with very detailed, curled bison within these round shapes, as if sleeping there. Perhaps both active and sleeping (or dying) animals were envisioned through the rock membrane and performed in this cave.11 Campsite evidence near the entrance of Altamira shows Ice Age peoples living there 22,000 to 13,000 years ago. The art is dated at 16,000 to 14,000 years ago.
At the smaller, El Buxu cave to the west, nearer to Tito Bustillo, there is also evidence of prehistoric habitation close to the cave’s entrance, 20,000 to 18,000 years ago. Deeper into the cave, through a one-meter, crawlspace passageway (with the floor lowered now for modern visitors), there is a chamber with etched and black-outlined goats on a natural arch. Further inside, matt-like, cross-hatched forms have been etched over the outlines of deer, as if covering them or performing magic upon them. In that area there is also a red, sideways E sign. Further into the cave, the most detailed horses are drawn, plus more goats and a large fallow deer above them. These etchings are very difficult to make out—until the Spanish guide, like a modern shaman, outlines them with the shadow of a finger or a red laser pointer, etching the images into the viewer’s brain as well.12 This relates to Ramanchandran’s neuro-aesthetic “peekaboo effect” with sudden object recognition evoking the rasa of “awe” through problem-solving reward networks in the limbic system and creating a distinctive memory pattern in the viewer’s temporal lobe, as the inner audience for restaging such figures in the imagination.
Near El Buxu and Tito Bustillo, the El Pindal cave entrance has a wonderful view of the Atlantic, from a cliff overlooking the sea, though in prehistoric times the water level was much lower, so the view would have been different. Along the walls inside the cave, which has no evidence of habitation, there are significant red animal outlines and markings. Moving into the depths one finds: triangles (perhaps akin to the vulva or hoof marks in Tito Bustillo), bison and a horse that involve the natural concave surfaces, abstract outlines and repeated “claviforms” (key or club shapes like the letter “P”), many dots, a deer or goat figure with hash marks on the rock ledge over it, five vertical lines crossed by two thick horizontal ones, and the outline of a mammoth with a red spot outside it and another mammoth nearby with a similar spot inside it (both facing deeper into the cave).
Such animal outlines and abstractions relate to Ramachandran’s law of a “peak shift effect,” like the red lines on a yellow stick as a super beak for a seagull chick’s pecking instinct. The red spots inside and outside the mammoth outlines may depict a super-natural soul or heart, as a visionary trigger for the rasas of “awe” and “heroic vigor.” The one inside could also be a hunter’s target for the primal emotion of seeking and the need to feed. But such an encounter outside the cave would have been a very rare event, since most of the hunting involved smaller game. Only three mammoth depictions have been found in the caves of northern Spain (but there are more in France, especially in the black outlines of Rouffignac). The artwork here is from 20,000 to 14,000 years ago.
These caves, along with others I describe later, show a long-term engagement with animal figures, floating on cave-wall surfaces, as paintings or etchings. Ice Age humans must have identified more with animals in their environment than we do today, since they were struggling to survive, like them, as predators and prey, in very harsh conditions. Performances with the cave art—as isolated experiences of visions in narrow caverns, such as El Buxu, or with more collective rituals in larger cave spaces, such as Tito Bustillo, Altamira, and El Pendal—probably involved both shadow play, as in Plato’s parable of the cave,13 and redefinitions of character, as in Lacan’s mirror stage. But if they were seeking ideal truths beyond the cave’s hallucinatory shadows and artistic images, prehistoric peoples were going deep inside, through the rock wall and its crevices, rather than outside to the sunlight, as in Plato’s myth. They may have been exploring something ontologically prior to Plato’s antitheatrical prejudice and his suspicions about art luring us away from truth. While inventing visual art on the cave walls, they were exploring transformations of identity: from shared mimetic emotions and movements, with animals of the environment outside the cave, to finding Self in distinctive human forms, through Other spirits, with desires like and unlike their own, captured in various movie-theatrical representations.
Mobile artworks have been found in many caves, such as El Pendo in Cantabria, which has evidence of Neanderthal and then human habitation, from 84,000 years ago until the Bronze Age. Occasional flooding from rainwater in the large mouth of that cave, and many fallen rocks, make excavations of the different layers of occupation difficult. But at the Paleolithic layer, hundreds of deer horns with various engravings were found, including a rare snake representation, also jaws eating a deer etched into bone from 20,000 years ago and a thin human female etched onto another bone (unlike the fat “Venus” sculptures found elsewhere). A Cro-Magnon child’s skull was also found. Such artistic figurines, along with evidence of prehistoric human habitation, may relate to Victoria Nelson’s argument about later puppets, robots, cyborgs, and virtual entities as “Neoplatonic daemons,” which still bear an “uncanny aura. . . even in a secular context,” thus showing us “the underground history of the soul” (31).
There are dozens of paintings deeper inside the El Pendo cave, from the same time period, beyond the reach of sunlight, along a 25-meter wall and another 9-meter wall. The higher paintings would have required scaffolding for the artists (as at Font-de-Gaume in France). But the red paintings later became covered with black bacteria, making them difficult to see, even after the walls were cleaned in modern times. There is a red deer with a small head, filled with fingertip dots of paint and yet empty at the center, perhaps suggesting pregnancy. There is also an incomplete horse without a head, a bull, and the disembodied head of a deer, plus two deer facing opposite ways outward, one with a long neck, the other with front legs up as if leaping. And there is another painting of a deer that uses a crack in the rock for its back. There is a possible snake form, too, and one deer head inside the outline of another deer, at its front quarters. Within this cave one can see partial remnants of a large gallery of prehistoric artworks, on the walls and in mobile objects left in the cave. They reflect the inner theaters of many prehistoric humans, mirroring various forms of the animal Other, and yet also the beast-person within, like figures from dreams.
More elaborate red paintings, with a possible anamorphic image, appear in the narrower passages of the Covalanes cave, which is also in Cantabria.14 Its rock formations include fossils of marine animals, such as seahorses, strange calcite cubes, and swirled surfaces, produced over the millennia by ocean and rain water, rushing or seeping through the earth. But it has no evidence of habitation. Its artwork dates from 20,000 years ago and becomes more vividly experienced today, as with the Niaux cave in France, because the cave is unlit, except by visitors’ flashlights. (Radioactive uranium in the calcite that formed naturally under and over some of the Covalanes artworks allows for objective, not just stylistic dating.) A rock panel shows a group of six female deer in red outlines, though they only appear gradually, through the guide’s tracings: a deer with a long neck, painted around a protruding rock for her stomach (suggesting pregnancy), a deer outlined with fingertip dots like in El Pendo, the full outline of a deer with legs in perspective, another deer with head turned and body colored in, and two deer with necks overlapping while facing opposite ways, so that one is clearly behind the other.
This mix of figures in faint red outlines and dim light appears fragmentary, like etchings in other caves (especially the many overlapping lines in France’s Combarelles cave). The fragments that form into wholes, but are cut up again by overlapping outlines, relate to Ramachandran’s neuroaesthetic law of “grouping” as a survival practice for prey and predator identification outside the caves. But such fragments may also reflect the illusory formation of the Self (as ideal ego) in the Lacanian mirror stage, masking the contrary experience of an alienated, uncoordinated, libidinous “body in pieces.” This occurs in infancy, as shown by the jubilation of the child in the mirror, but it also repeats throughout one’s life, with numerous desires of the Other on stages, mirrors, and screens that offer visions of a whole Self. Thus, one can see mirror-stage reflections of a prehistoric internal theater or “intra-organic mirror” (Lacan, Écrits 78) in caves such as Covalanes,15 with the emergence of a new form of human identity, tens of thousands of years ago, like yet beyond the perspectives of other animals.
On the opposite wall from that six-deer panel is an auroch (Ice Age bull) with the edge of the rock as its back. There are other deer further into the cave and then a horse with detailed mandible and mane. To the left and below it are a red colored-in triangle (or female sign) and three deer. On the opposite wall, under a rock curtain, there is another deer with long neck and lifted legs as if leaping. There are big deer on the inside of that curtain, plus a filled in triangle on top of a box (perhaps a phallic sign). And then, in a narrow passage, wide enough for just three people, another deer appears. But its full form with a white (calcite) eye is seen only at a distant angle, down the passageway, like the anamorphic illusions in later Western paintings, such as the two-dimensional skull in Hans Holbein’s The Ambassadors, which becomes three-dimensional when viewed at an angle.
Lacan uses this skull as an example of how “consciousness, in its illusion of seeing itself seeing itself, finds its basis in the inside-out structure of the gaze,” with an object reflecting the ghostly lack of being in the subject (Four 82, 86–89). Likewise, according to current neuroscience, human consciousness emerges, beyond biological determinism, through the recursive complexity of the brain’s neural networks interacting with outer social networks (Gazzaniga)—in a fractal hall of mirrors. One can see this illusory nature of human consciousness in Covalanes, emerging in a distinctive way 20,000 years ago, with the gaze of the shamanic artist and spectator reflected in the eye of the deer as Other. The uncanny deer, in this sense, is a “phallic ghost,” as Lacan says about the Holbein skull, signifying the lack of being and “want to be” in humankind’s early evolution beyond the natural environment. Ironically, humans may have glimpsed their increasing power over other animals by envisioning animal spirits within their brains and projecting them as artistic representations, making cave walls into emotional, movie-theatrical mirrors.
Another Cantabrian cave, El Castillo, shows evidence of being inhabited as long as 120,000 years ago by Neanderthals and then, much later, by prehistoric humans. Originally, there was a tight crawl space for the entrance, but it is now deeply excavated into a wide opening, with an “Interpretation Center” nearby. Inside, there is a large chamber with horses in red outline on a flat cracked surface, plus partial outlines of deer and bison, floating on the rock canvas and pointing downward. There is also a black bison pointing down, with a small deer coming out of its back and a red negative handprint on its left, from 30,000 years ago. (This term refers to the Paleolithic practice of putting a hand against the rock and blowing or brushing paint around it, leaving its imprint as a negative space within the painting. A “positive handprint” involves putting paint on the hand and then placing it on the rock.) Lower down, in a wide chamber, there is also the outline of a red bison, with negative handprints below it, on its left. Further inside can be found the print of a right hand made with the back of the hand to the wall, two bison in black outlines on a rock ledge, a smaller chamber with an auroch outline, horizontal spots, another auroch, spots in a horn shape, and then, after 10 meters of blank wall, some diamond shapes with tails, like kites, plus further images deeper into the cave, not accessible to the public. The large chambers in El Castillo would allow many people to participate in ritual performances, though there is a steep grade within and between some of the areas. The 60 handprints throughout the cave may show some kind of formal sign system, or “I was here” gesture, or simply playfulness.
Language, identity, and play are key elements in the new form of human mind that evolved with cave art.16 As mentioned in the previous chapter, Merlin Donald has mapped the stages of cognitive and cultural evolution in our hominin ancestors: from episodic animal consciousness toward mimetic communication with kinetic gestures and playfulness in Homo erectus two million years ago, then to a mythic culture with verbal language in Homo sapiens a half million years ago, and then to a theoretic culture of technology and art 40,000 years ago, as evidenced by the cave and mobile artworks (120, 255, 260–74).17 These levels of consciousness, communication, and identity are also stages that we pass through today, from childhood to adulthood, forming layers of our internal and external theaters. Archeologist Stephen Mithen gives a similar timeline and adds that humans about 40,000 years ago evolved a new “cognitive fluidity” between various types of intelligence that had been isolated in the hominin brain before that: natural history intelligence (such as interpreting animal hoof prints), social intelligence (with intentional communication), and technical intelligence (producing artifacts from mental templates).18 This led to new productions of symbolic meanings that mixed natural, social, and technical brain mappings of inner and outer worlds, with movie-theatrical performances in the caves, involving animal, human, and abstract figures.
The cognitive fluidity of Ice Age cave theater also involved music. Las Monedas cave, a short walk from El Castillo, has many geological spectacles and a small area of manmade art, with a smiling reindeer, horses, a fox, a bison, and various other shapes from 12,000 years ago. When I took a tour there, a guide illustrated the performative qualities of that cave by tapping several hollow stalactites of varying sizes with his knuckles, like a xylophone (or “lithophone,” as he called it), showing the different notes they contained and the soft echoes of the cavern, as if in a small concert hall. He pointed to much larger organ-like columns, closer to the entrance of the cave, suggesting musical possibilities in various caverns. Also, the echoing of the human voice, in this cave and others, evokes musical and super-natural qualities, which may have influenced the placement and performance of Paleolithic art (Díaz-Andreu et al.).
Hornos de la Peña, which is also in Cantabria, offers a very different experience. One has to crouch or crawl with the guide into very small chambers (some with room for just a few people), which have mostly etchings, but also a few paintings. A horse and auroch are engraved in an area near the entrance, which was inhabited 28,000 years ago. Then there is a tight space to crawl through, into a somewhat larger chamber, which might hold a dozen people, where another horse is engraved on the wall, also “macaroni” finger fluting (produced by human fingers moving through the soft clay of the cave, in straight or wavy lines), a goat from 20,000 to 18,000 years ago, with its eye involving the rock’s natural indentation, and a bison from 15,000 years ago. Deeper into the cave are a goat and more abstract lines from 30,000 to 28,000 years ago on one side of a small chamber, with larger horses and a deer head to the right, plus a possible serpent figure. Above the horses, there is an “anthromorph”: a human figure with a bird head, raised hand, and tail, from 20,000 years ago. Nearby is a horse with cross-hatches over it. And in the low ceiling, there is a horse with a hole in its stomach or womb. The guide explained that horno means “oven,” and is also a reference to “womb” in Spanish, as in the English phrase for a pregnant woman “with one in the oven.”
The experience of entering this cave and its small chambers with difficult to discern, yet intriguing engravings, and then crawling (sometimes backwards) out of the cave, also makes it a womb-like space, or chora, in Plato’s and Kristeva’s (Lacanian) sense: an enclosed space of becoming for the thetic, Imaginary subject, via the art on the walls as performative, interpretive mirrors. The Self of each visitor today is changed, to some degree, by performing with the guide and others in a small group, squeezing their bodies into a space inside “Mother Earth” and perceiving the paintings and etchings—as lines and scratches in the rock, made tens of thousands of years ago, which gain Gestalt forms once again. Although we live in a very different world now, with mass-media screens, electric lights, climate-controlled homes, food in grocery stores, vehicles for speedy travel, and many other transformations of the environment, we can find a kinship with our prehistoric ancestors through such cave theaters. (The term “ancestors” here assumes that similar artistic impulses developed in prehistoric humans around the world, not just in Europe.) We can glimpse how their sense of Self was emerging, through reflections on animal and human nature, in the various reptilian/mammalian forms and a peculiar bird-man with a tail—in this cave as a chora “where the subject is both generated and negated” (Kristeva, Revolution 28). We can see evidence of the prehistoric mind, with its cognitive fluidity, creating imaginative and sometimes hybrid creatures, as characters for Self and Other, yet also seeking a “cognitive anchor” in the cave images or symbols, as in later religious art and ritual performances (Mithen, “Evolution” 48–50).
There are various caves in France (like Chauvet) with elaborate artistic expressions that I have written about elsewhere: Lascaux, Font-de-Gaume, Combarelles, Rouffignac, Cougnac, Pech Merle, and Niaux. But there are also smaller French caves with details worth considering.
The several caves of Grottes d’Arcy offer the closest location to Paris for viewing prehistoric art. Unfortunately, 80% of the art there was destroyed in 1976 by a foolish attempt to clean it. The paintings that remain, in the single cave open to the public, are located near the back, on the sides and ceiling of wide chambers, with floors that would have been lower 28,000 years ago when the art was made. This suggests collective ritual experiences, after individuals placed red or black outlines of mammoths and deer on the rock surfaces—like the medieval cathedrals of France with stained glass, sculptures, and artworks that raise viewers’ eyes upward.
The Merveilles cave is located farther south, near a popular tourist site, the medieval cliff-side town of Rocamadour (worth a visit also). The cave was inhabited 20,000 years ago and has some interesting natural formations, along with paintings and etchings near the entrance, mostly in a single large chamber. They are difficult to see, even with the guide’s help. There is a negative handprint over a deer that appears to be leaping through a calcite (white) barrier, although that may have formed in the thousands of years after the artwork was made. (The natural spectacles in various caves considered here, stalactites and stalagmites, columns and drapes, grew very gradually, taking thousands of years to form.) To the right of that handprint and deer is a stag with an oversized head, a horse facing the opposite way, a negative handprint that strangely has six fingers, a big horse, and perhaps a hyena.
Gargas, a cave in the Pyrenees,19 has handprints, plus animal outlines and etchings, from around the start of the cave art era, 30,000 years ago. There is the negative print of a child’s hand near the small living area by the original entrance, then many adult hands deeper into cave, especially on one wall. There is also a handprint at the opening to an inner chamber, with a red spot on the other side, perhaps signifying something about that inner space (which is off limits to visitors today). There are a total of 231 hands in the cave, with 124 clearly visible and just 10 of those having all their fingers (Curtis 196–97). Over half of the hands are missing all four fingers, with just a thumb showing. None have a missing thumb. This may signify the importance of an opposable thumb, or some other hand-sign language that we cannot read today. But the art throughout the cave seems to have started with a child’s gesture, near a campsite home at the cave’s entrance, perhaps making a playful handprint—before it became an adult performance rite. This may have involved hands disappearing into the rock wall, communing with the spirits there as they were painted over, leaving negative prints (Lewis-Williams, Mind 216–20).
It has been observed by primatologists that humans exhibit “neoteny”: both physically and behaviorally we look like young apes (de Waal, Our 240–41). Adult humans, with round heads and flat faces, extend youthful play into many performance activities, from theater to sports to video-games, while also displaying the curiosity and inventiveness that led to vast transformations of culture and environment in prior generations. Prehistoric artists may have had very serious reasons for painting their hands onto the cave wall, especially with missing fingers. Some paleontologists today speculate that the fingers were lost due to frostbite or disease, or were deliberately cut off in sacrificial rites. But it is more likely that the cave artists were displaying the significance of digits, as present or absent, by bending their fingers while making the handprint—to make it appear fingerless. Such playful fragmentation in art, involving potential metaphors or signs, shows a crucial element in the growing flexibility of our human ancestors as big-brained apes. For better and worse, humans found ways to survive and reproduce far beyond natural instincts, by playing with their inner drives and brain theaters, projecting them outward as spirits and cave images, and eventually changing the world. But then the problem became, as it still is now, how to limit human creativity and destructiveness, in performance spaces beyond the cave.
North of the main cave-art area around Lascaux, the Villars cave20 has spectacular natural features, including needle-like stalactites and rock drapery, enhanced by the modern tour’s sound and light show. Through a low and narrow passage, the guide takes visitors to half a dozen black horse outlines, including one that has changed to blue over the millennia, with a few millimeters of natural white calcite covering it. Close to the cave’s prehistoric entrance, a wall painting shows a bison apparently charging at a thinly drawn man, almost a stick figure, whose hand extends over his head, perhaps in fear or to provoke the bison, or with magic power over it.21
The art here is recent, compared to Chauvet and Gargas. It is from about 18,000–17,000 years ago, almost as close to our time as it was to the artwork of those other caves. This approaches the end of the Paleolithic cave art period in Europe and start of the Neolithic agricultural revolution, 11,000 years ago in Mesopotamia, which led to the domestication of certain prey animals, whose images are in the caves: goats, aurochs, and horses. They were captured in ways beyond artistic representation and turned to other uses, as humans created increasingly large settlements and then civilizations, involving the storage of wealth with a warrior class and weaponry to defend it or take it away from others. As the Judeo-Christian scriptures put it, mankind gained “dominion” over the animals, through God’s creative will. Yet some animals, such as charging bison, could still be a threat. The cognitive anchors of religious beliefs, with gods as super-parental figures (perhaps deriving from cave images), gave limits to the reckless playfulness of the human ape and conceptual constraints to our big-brained plasticity. Such beliefs, making up for the lack of instinctual patterns of perception and behavior in our species, are still needed by many today, even as science has given other cognitive anchors in the last half millennium, which have also led to great destructiveness, as well as creativity and good works, in theaters beyond the cave.
Pair-non-Pair, north of Bourdeaux, had a small prehistoric entry hole, which required crawling, but prevented bears from entering the cave. Inside, there is a man-made ring in the low stone ceiling, perhaps for an animal-skin curtain as a barrier against the cold. Such evidence of habitation at the entrance of this cave relates to the steady temperature inside, near 60 degrees Fahrenheit all year, as compared to the Ice Age extremes outside. There is a second chamber beyond the entryway here, with etchings (plus a hole above, giving light), and a third room with a natural spring and pool, a vent in the rock ceiling for a campfire, and more engravings. With the help of the guide, one can find a mammoth with a goat above it, a bison, and several horses. Two of the horses have long necks, one with an open mouth, looking back at the pool area. There is also a megaceros (giant elk) and a large horse over it, involving differences in the natural rock colors for shading. There are seashells in the rock used for the eyes of the horse and mammoth. This cave was inhabited over a long period, from 80,000 to 18,000 years ago, by Neanderthals and humans. The art is from 30,000 years ago, in the earliest period of cave theaters, like Chauvet.
Ice Age humans saw their own faces much less than we do today with our mirrors, photos, videos, and Facebook sites. Yet, with a pool of water in caves like Pair-non-Pair, prehistoric infants might have experienced the mirror stage in that horizontal mirror, as well as through the mother’s touch, smell, cooing, and facial expressions. The further imaging of Self and Other, through perceptions and etchings of animal figures on the cave walls, may relate to the good fortune that adults felt in finding this cave, where they could live with a campfire, water, shelter, and a steady temperature. The engraving of the horse with a long neck and open mouth, looking back at the pool area, may speak to this—and to touch, sound, movement, and vision as aspects of performance in the small ritual spaces of this cave theater.
Why are there very few human images in prehistoric cave paintings (other than handprints)22—and none in the finely detailed, lifelike style of certain animals in Chauvet, Lascaux, Font-de-Gaume, Niaux, and Altamira? Findings from neuroscience about the brain’s basic anatomical functions, which we share with Paleolithic peoples, along with the evidence of theatrical spaces and images in the caves, interpreted through psychoanalytic cultural theory and dream research, may provide an answer.
The performances of everyday life, even today, involve “emotional contagion” and mimicry between brains, often at a subconscious level, through intuition (Von Economo) and mirror neurons, like in a herd, pack, or flock of animals moving collectively, with individuals reacting to subtle cues from others.23 Simulations in the brain mirror another person’s actions, facial expressions, gestures, vocal tones, and phonemes, beyond (or beneath) verbal language. Our brain theaters play the character of the other we observe or interact with, sending signals to perform the other’s actions and emotions, as “somatic markers” (in Damasio’s phrase) of the other’s thoughts and feelings.
Thus, our prehistoric ancestors may have felt a kinship with herd animals in their environment, such as horses, deer, elk, bison, aurochs, ibexes, mammoths, and rhinos, which they etched and painted inside certain caves. Yet these creatures are often depicted as individuals, floating on the rock wall and sometimes overlapping—as if with a degree of theatrical self-reflection, based in, but moving beyond a continuous herd mentality. The prehistoric sense of a Self was probably continuous with the natural environment and its impressively large herd animals. A distinctive image and symbolic order of “human being,” with super-natural powers, may have emerged through identifications with such herd animals and their contagious mimicry, yet individualized movements.
Today, I (like other humans) have a sense of my own character that inhibits most of my mimicry at the overt level, unless I choose to copy someone’s gestures. This is especially so in the dominant convention of Euro-American spectatorship. I watch the show with others moving around the stage, or onscreen, while I stay in my seat, participating vicariously. Even with my brain sending signals to mimic the movements and emotions onstage, I remain still—like most people while dreaming, when motor and emotion circuits are active, but the body’s movements are inhibited. However, some people suffer from “echopraxia,” due to damage in the “braking mechanism” of the frontal lobes; they compulsively mimic others or do typical things in certain contexts (Rizzolatti and Sinigaglia 151). This shows how mimicry is signaled in the rest of us, too, but blocked by our frontal lobes.
The human sense of Self in our prehistoric ancestors emerged from proto to core selves (which other animals have) to an autobiographical identity, through emotional contagion and mirror neurons—using inner simulations of the Other to form the conscious Self. As with infants today in the mirror stage and all of us later in life, the character of Self in our prehistoric relatives developed through interactions with the Other: from “the specular I . . . into the social I” (Lacan, Écrits 79). The Self, unifying various selves in the brain and nervous system as a character onstage in the inner theater, uses reflective images from the Other’s apparent perceptions to form simulations of the Other’s simulation of the Self, putting those into the developing plot of autobiographical memories, fantasies, and dreams.
The Other for Ice Age humans was very different from ours. It involved few contacts with other persons, and no mass-media images, just a small tribal group, as extended family, occasional meetings with other groups, and the natural environment with many fellow animals, including impressively large creatures, which became the dominant images in the caves. And yet, like our prehistoric ancestors, we have remnant animal drives within our nervous system, as a “fragmented body,” moving in contradictory ways behind the mask of Self and its body image (or Gestalt). Lacan sees this exemplified in the human infant’s normally premature birth, with an uncoordinated, libidinal body at the age of 6–18 months, finding a jubilant, yet illusory wholeness in its mirror image—and in its multisensory interactions with the (m)Other. The proto-self, monitoring interior body states, and the core self, interacting physically with the world, are not fully unified in their mappings. Their dispositions are divergent as well as convergent. But with the development of an autobiographical Self, in each human child and in our ancestors’ evolution, a newly unified (although hollow) ego emerges, involving right-cortical intuitions and left-cortical language areas, like the holistic animal images and yet abstract, possibly symbolic figures on the cave walls.24 Or like the herd of hands in some caves, with absent fingers as a sign language of distinctive personal marks.
Theatrical spaces and images in prehistoric caves show particular instances of mirror-stage, contagious interactions between early humans and their minds’ projections onto the rock walls. These probably involved (1) their basic animal drives, (2) remembered animal forms from their environment, and (3) animal characters or fluid animal-human hybrids from their inner brain theaters, including mythic plots, as well as handprints and other signs, which we can no longer read. We cannot know what the bison/lion-headed man/woman in Chauvet meant to its creators, or the full plot of the bison charging the stick-man in Villars, or the rasas of the bird-headed man with a tail and raised hand in Hornos de la Peña. But we can see how the animal or animal-human Other depicted on the cave wall, or envisioned through the rock membrane, became a way for early humans to develop an image of Self as part of the natural world, yet evolving beyond it. Our ancestors, tens of thousands of years ago, were just starting to develop the illusions and realities of human ego power, over animals and nature. So they made far fewer images of the human form.
As mentioned in the first chapter, children today often dream of wild animals, while having little or no contact with them in reality. Dream researcher Antii Revonsuo theorizes that our dreams, like those of other mammals, may have evolved as “threat rehearsals” for survival in real life—and that we carry in our brain the prehistoric images that haunted our ancestors for thousands of years, yet helped them to survive and produce us (85–111). As we mature in our modern world, we absorb images from its threats and goals to rehearse in our dreams, masking our ancestors’ interactions with “wild” animals as natural dangers, food sources, and spirit guides. But they may appear again, as urban invaders, tame livestock, lovable pets, or beast-people in our dreams and current emotion picture media.
The many overlapping images in cave paintings and etchings might show the prehistoric threats of humans to one another, as well as the depths of each person’s visionary perceptions through the rock wall. Like graffiti artists today, cave performers may have competed to present their tribal or personal totem, overwriting those of others. And yet, the mixture of animal outlines also suggests the source of such ego and group aggression in each of us: the fragmented body behind the Self, which finds an illusory wholeness in the mirror or theatrical image, as display and gaze of the Other. The Self is thus a fragile character, alienated by the Other’s misrecognitions and social demands. This produces, even in the mirror-stage infant, a defensive “armor” of Self, masking its own fragility and inherent paranoia, which sometimes results in aggression toward others, especially those figured as evil (Lacan, Écrits 78–79).
The cave theaters of Spain and France, along with Herzog’s film of the Chauvet cave, show particular mappings of the “extended minds”25 of our prehistoric ancestors. These relate to (1) the mirror stage that we each pass through as infants, reflecting an idealized Self and Other, yet also the animal scripts of primal emotions within us, (2) the media screens where we find ideal and fragmented ego images, sometimes as animal or animal-human monsters, and (3) the mappings that our inner brain theaters perform in everyday life, with backstage signaling, biased projections, and conscious communications between us, as explored in the next chapter. Prehistoric cave art shows the brains of our ancestors—like ours today—filtering their perceptions of reality through memories, goals, and fantasies, involving primal (animal-drive) mappings and higher-order dispositions, from the unconscious mind to the conscious staging of Self and Other, through pictures on rock-wall screens, moving in the firelight and evoking emotions in performers and watchers.
Subsequent religious traditions repressed the animist insights of prehistoric cave performers and “pagan” shamans, with sky gods and monotheisms. Hell, on the medieval European stage, was represented by a monstrous cave.26 But if we dig back through the layers of such cultural ideals, past the ancient Greek “birth” of theater, imagining cave theatricality in prehistory, then a primal Thespis can be glimpsed in the many handprints, abstract shapes, animal forms, and animal-human hybrid figures of specific chambers and their rock-wall scenery. Such artworks, like the beast-people in many movies today, remind us that in becoming human, technological, and virtual, we are still animals—and sometimes “wild” beyond our dreams. Prehistoric performers’ paintings and engravings reflect how we use each other, as animals and media figures, to map the fragments of Self into transcendent yet illusory characters, which have real effects on our continuing biological and cultural evolution.