DISCOVERING OUR EARLIEST ANCESTORS
IN 2015, THE OCTOBER ISSUE OF NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC magazine featured a story about an exciting discovery made by Lee Berger and his team in a South African cave called Rising Star. After being notified by two recreational cavers that they had seen bones covering a floor deep within the cave, Berger’s team began investigating and eventually found more than fifteen hundred bones from at least fifteen individuals, which he thinks belong to a previously unknown hominin species. They have been named Homo naledi, after the cave in which they were found. Naledi means “star” in the Sesotho language, and hominin, a term used throughout this chapter, refers to modern humans, extinct human species, and all of our immediate ancestors.
The bones may be up to 2.8 million years old. They were all found in the almost-inaccessible chamber in the cave in 2013 and 2014, after the two spelunkers showed Berger how to get there. As Jamie Shreeve of National Geographic describes it, this required going through a passageway known as Superman’s Crawl, which is less than ten inches high and can be traversed only if you hold one arm tight against your body and extend the other above your head, like Superman when he is flying; then climbing up a vertical wall of jagged rock called the Dragon’s Back; and then, after a number of other twists and turns, finally squeezing through a passage that at one point narrows to only seven and a half inches wide, before reaching the Dinaledi Chamber in which the bones lie.
The six scientists who subsequently retrieved the bones over a two-year period were all experienced women archaeologists who were small enough to fit through all these passageways. According to Shreeve, Berger advertised on Facebook that he needed “Skinny individuals, with scientific credentials and caving experience” who were “willing to work in cramped quarters.” He heard from sixty applicants in just ten days and chose those six, whom he called “underground astronauts.”
Their findings are extremely exciting, though not without a certain amount of controversy. If these are deliberate burials, as Berger hypothesizes, it would mean that we may be looking at some of the earliest examples of human self-consciousness, possibly an understanding of past and future, perhaps even a sense of religion going back millions of years—because otherwise the bodies would have been left to lie where the individuals had died, rather than being deliberately brought to this part of the cave. It is, as some have described, a mind-numbing possibility; game changing for those studying human evolution.
Some scholars have taken issue with Berger’s use of teams of young anthropologists from around the world to study the body parts and the rapidity with which he publishes the results in open-access journals, including three-dimensional images of the fossils, so that others can download and create their own casts of them. They prefer the slow pace of other researchers who have typically taken decades to analyze and publish a single skeleton, but Berger’s approach represents a new way to crowd-source the study of the remains by experts from around the world rather than a single person and may be a harbinger of things to come in this Internet age.
Berger’s discoveries are within the subfield of prehistoric archaeology, otherwise known as palaeoanthropology. Archaeologists in this field study a period that covers millions of years—from our earliest hominin ancestors right up until the beginnings of recorded history. Archaeological convention has split this long period of time into several eras:
• The Paleolithic, or Old Stone Age, which extends from about 3.5 million years ago all the way down to anywhere from twenty thousand to twelve thousand years ago; the end point depends upon whether one is talking about Africa, Europe, or Asia
• The Mesolithic, or Middle Stone Age, which continues to about ten thousand years ago
• The Neolithic, or New Stone Age, which lasts until about forty-five hundred years ago
The most famous modern family to work in prehistoric archaeology are the Leakeys. Louis and Mary Leakey are the first generation; their son Richard and his wife Meave are the second generation; and Louise—granddaughter of Louis and Mary—is the third generation.
Louise, who received her PhD from University College London in 2001, reportedly holds the record of being the youngest person ever to find a hominoid fossil. She was only six in 1977 when she found a tooth of a primate ancestor that was 17 million years old. Twenty-two years later, in 1999, she and her mother Meave found a 3.5-million-year-old skull belonging to an early human. Louise also has been involved since 1993 in the Koobi Fora project in northern Kenya, where her father Richard first began working in 1968 and her mother Meave started in 1969.
Meave began her career by working for Louis Leakey, who was first her dissertation adviser and later her father-in-law, after she married Richard in 1970. Richard became well known in his own right, with a long and distinguished career and numerous publications, including the book Origins, which was written for the general public. Among the notable discoveries made by his teams was a nearly complete 1.5-million-year-old skeleton. Kamoya Kimeu, a native Kenyan working with Richard and who had worked with Louis and Mary from the 1950s, found the first fragment in 1984; the rest were painstakingly recovered during five seasons of meticulous excavation. “Turkana Boy,” as he is known, was probably about eight to eleven years old when he died. He is usually considered to be an example of Homo erectus; that is, a direct ancestor of modern humans.
Louis grew up in Kenya and was one of the first people to argue that human origins should be sought in Africa, rather than in Asia, which had been the generally accepted theory until then. He turned out to be correct, though it took a while for others to come around to his point of view. His case was proven by the finds that he and Mary made, beginning in 1948, but then especially from 1959 on. At that time, they were working in a canyon or ravine that was thirty miles long and three hundred feet deep, known as Olduvai Gorge in Tanzania.
Here Louis and Mary found skeletal fragments that they identified as coming from a new species of hominin. Actually, it was Mary who found the first fragment, because Louis was back at the camp with a fever. She went out with their two Dalmatian dogs to check on a site that they hadn’t visited since 1931 and promptly found a fragment of skull and two teeth in a hominin jaw. She jumped in the Land Rover and drove back to get Louis. The two of them then found even more bone fragments and were able to reconstruct much of the skull.
Because they were the first discoverers of this species, they got to name it. They initially called it Zinjanthropus boisei, after their primary sponsor at the time, Charles Boise, but it was later reassigned to a different genus (according to the taxonoemic ranking system used in biological classifications) and is now called Australopithecus (or Paranthropus) boisei. They also initially thought that it dated to about six hundred thousand years ago, but a dating technique that was new at the time, involving measuring the radioactive decay of potassium into argon in volcanic rock, quickly showed that it was more like 1.75 million years old. At the time, the discovery created a sensation because of its extreme age.
They promptly followed up their discovery the next year by discovering yet another new hominin species, Homo habilis. This time they didn’t name it after a sponsor. Instead, its name reflects the fact that fossil remains of this species are often found associated with stone tools, for Homo habilis translates roughly as “handy man.”
It would be hard for us to imagine what it was like for the Leakeys in those early days, except that we have photographs of them working from that period. We see them picking carefully at the dirt, in extremely hot conditions, with a huge umbrella planted for shade and several Dalmatian dogs keeping them company.
It was after Louis died in 1972 that Mary made what is considered to be her most significant discovery—the hominin footprints at Laetoli, which were found in 1978 and 1979. The site is located about forty-five kilometers southeast of Olduvai Gorge. Team members who were throwing elephant dung at each other for fun had found the first footprints at the site a few years earlier, in 1976, but animals had made all of those.
Three individuals who were walking across freshly fallen ash from a nearby volcano about 3.6 million years ago created the famous footprints. It is usually suggested that the footprints were made by hominins that we call Australopithecus afarensis. Two of the trails appear to have been made by individuals walking in cadence—that is, walking together—but the third may be unrelated to the first two. In any event, judging from the impressions that were left, all three were less than five feet tall.
We can only imagine what it would have been like for those individuals at the time that they were walking through the area. The volcano would have been erupting in the distance, while ash was falling all around them, perhaps mixed with rain. It is likely to have been overcast, with smoke from the eruption obscuring the sun, but it is conceivable that it was dark as night, as Pliny the Younger reported during the eruption of Mount Vesuvius millions of years later. Animals would have been heading for safety, perhaps oblivious to the short hominins, but it doesn’t look like our three were in too much of a hurry. The imprints of their feet indicate that they were walking rather than running, even though it is unlikely that the day was typical for them.
In all, Mary Leakey and her team found about seventy footprints from these human ancestors that go on for almost ninety feet. They are the earliest direct evidence of hominin bipedalism and are now reproduced in the floor of the Hall of Human Origins in the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History in Washington, DC, as well as at the American Museum of Natural History in New York City.
These are not the only early footprints that have been found. Another series of footprints were found in 2007 and 2008 at Koobi Fora near Lake Turkana. These are only about 1.5 million years old, so they are more recent by 2 million years than the ones that Mary Leakey found. Members of Homo erectus similar to Turkana Boy probably made the Koobi Fora footprints. They are about a size 9, in terms of today’s men’s shoes.
All these discoveries have helped to dispel the long shadow that was cast for decades by the so-called Piltdown Man, one of the most famous hoaxes in the history of archaeology. In 1912, long before the Leakeys had begun their explorations, a man named Charles Dawson announced that he had discovered some skull fragments, teeth, and a jawbone in the Piltdown gravel quarry in England. Quickly touted as “the missing link” between humans and apes, the discovery caused a sensation, but it also raised suspicions almost immediately. Partly, the controversy was nationalist—French scholar Boucher de Perthes had found early hominin tools in 1846 near the Sommes River and the Germans had discovered the species Neanderthal in their Neander Valley in 1856; the British had no counterpart until the discovery at Piltdown.
Leading scientists published their doubts within just a few years, but it took until 1953 to prove definitively that Piltdown Man was a fabrication. The skull was human but dated to the medieval period; the fossilized teeth were from a chimpanzee; and the jawbone, which was about five hundred years old, was from an orangutan. Dawson died in 1916, but he has long been suspected of creating the forgery. He is not the only suspect in this unsolved crime, though; the list of possible forgers is pretty long and even includes Arthur Conan Doyle, the creator of Sherlock Holmes.
Real discoveries continued to be made. It was in 1974, soon after Louis Leakey died and just two years before Mary Leakey found the first footprints at Laetoli, that Berkeley paleoanthropologist Donald Johanson made a discovery that ensured his inclusion in the prehistory Hall of Fame.
As frequently happens in archaeology, it was a chance discovery. Johanson and a colleague were surveying near the site of Hadar, in Ethiopia, far to the north of Tanzania where the Leakeys had been working. After a long day in the hot sun with nothing to show for their efforts, they began walking back to where they had parked their Land Rover. Rather than go back the way that they had come, Johanson suggested going a different route, via a gully that they hadn’t been through before. As he tells the story, first they spotted a bone from a hominin forearm, then—in rapid succession—a skull fragment, a leg bone, ribs, a pelvis, and a lower jaw. Within two weeks, they had found several hundred pieces of bone, all belonging to a single skeleton.
Lucy, as she is called, died when she was about twenty years old, which was about 3.2 million years ago. She has been identified as an Australopithecus afarensis and resembled the individuals who left their footprints at Laetoli five hundred thousand years earlier. It is believed that she would have stood about three and a half to four feet tall and weighed about sixty-five pounds at most. That’s just an estimate, though, since we have only about 40 percent of her skeleton, but it was still the most complete hominin skeleton found to that time.
The Beatles’ song “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds” was playing over and over again at the party that night back in the camp when they first returned with the skeletal remains. Sometime that evening they began referring to her as Lucy. She is still called that today.
Lee Berger’s discoveries show that caves also can be extremely important sites for prehistoric archaeology, for they play a crucial role in helping us understand our connections to the deep past. Some of the most famous discoveries in caves were made in the 1920s and 1930s by an archaeologist named Dorothy Garrod and several colleagues within a cluster of caves on the slopes of Mount Carmel, south of the modern city of Haifa in what is now Israel. UNESCO recognized the caves as a World Heritage Site in 2012. Most of them are open to the public and can be seen without an appointment—the path for tourists is well maintained, but visitors must be prepared for very hot and dry conditions, especially during the summer.
Garrod is widely recognized as one of the most important early archaeologists. She was the first woman to be named a professor at Cambridge University in England, where she held the Disney Chair of Archaeology from 1939 to 1952. This is a very distinguished professorship that has nothing to do with Walt Disney, but rather was established back in 1851 by a man named John Disney.
Dorothy Garrod’s specialty was the Paleolithic period. Her first excavation at Mount Carmel was in Kebara Cave, where she briefly dug in 1928. She then moved on and spent five years, from 1929 to 1934, excavating two other caves, of which the more famous is known as the Tabun Cave; the other is known as el-Wad. She was able to show that the two caves were occupied pretty much continuously for about half a million years. Tabun Cave was occupied first, from about five hundred thousand years ago to forty thousand years ago; the occupation of el-Wad begins just before Tabun is abandoned, about forty-five thousand years ago.
Within Tabun Cave is a burial of a Neanderthal woman, dating to about one hundred twenty thousand years ago. The skull indicates that her brain was about the same size as ours today, but she had no real chin and a very low forehead.
There are also burials in nearby Skhul Cave, which was excavated by Theodore McCown, a US colleague of Garrod’s. These burials, however, about fourteen in all, and dating to between one hundred twenty thousand and eighty thousand years ago, are members of our own human species, Homo sapiens sapiens, also called anatomically modern people. The burials have generated much discussion among scholars, who include this evidence as support for the proposition that Neanderthals and modern humans were separate species and lived side by side for a time. Recent DNA studies indicate that modern humans and Neanderthals interbred and their European and Asian descendants—including many of us—have genetic markers of each.
From 1982 to 1989, Harvard archaeologist Ofer Bar-Yosef returned to Kebara Cave, where Garrod had dug in 1928. There he and his team found a Neanderthal burial—an adult male who lived about sixty thousand years ago. Nicknamed Moshe, his may be the most complete Neanderthal skeleton found to date. It caused a great deal of excitement when he was discovered, because even though his head was missing, there were bones from his throat that indicated he may have been capable of speech, which had always been a question about Neanderthals and other premodern hominins, speech being an important event in human evolution.
Moshe would date to about the same time as the Neanderthal burials that have been found at Shanidar Cave in northern Iraq, which Columbia anthropologist Ralph Solecki excavated during several seasons from 1951 to 1961. The ten individuals that Solecki and his team excavated are usually dated to between sixty-five thousand and thirty-five thousand years ago. They have been of intense interest, in part because one of them—called Shanidar 1—was a relatively old man (between forty and fifty years old) at the time of his death and showed evidence of having sustained, and survived, multiple injuries during his lifetime, which means that his group took care of their sick and wounded. Another, an adult male known as Shanidar 4, who died sometime between the ages of thirty and forty-five, was long thought to have been buried with flowers, which was interpreted as some sort of burial ritual, perhaps even an indication of belief in an afterlife or simply just a touching remembrance from a surviving family member. It has also been hypothesized that he might have been some sort of medicine man, since some of the flowers are from plants with medicinal properties, like ragwort and hollyhock. More recently, however, it has been suggested that the flower remains may be the result of later intrusions by a rodent, which is much less interesting and will mean rethinking much of what has been previously written.
In Europe—specifically in France and Spain—are other caves that are famous for their wall paintings, including Chauvet and Lascaux in France and Altamira in Spain. Chauvet is by far the oldest, with the first remains there dating to about 35,000 BCE; then comes Lascaux at approximately 15,000 BCE; and then Altamira at about 12,000 BCE.
Altamira may be the youngest, relatively speaking, but it was the first of these three caves to be discovered. It was first noticed by a hunter in 1868 and then visited by a local landowner, Don Marcelino Sanz de Sautuola, in 1876. Two years later, having been inspired by a show about Paleolithic art in Paris in 1878, de Sautuola returned to the cave with his eight-year-old daughter Maria. She spotted the paintings on the wall while he was busy excavating the cave floor, looking for tools and other artifacts. His subsequent announcement of the discovery in 1880 was met with disbelief from the scholarly establishment. How could people this primitive create art that was so evocative, skilled, even artistic? It was only decades later, long after his death, that the scholars admitted he had been right about the antiquity of the paintings.
The paintings in the cave are usually dated to about 12,000 BCE, at the time of the end of the last Ice Age, although some scholars have argued that they could be a good deal older. They certainly are not any more recent, because a rockslide sealed closed the entrance to the cave at that time.
The cave itself is about three hundred meters long, with the usual passages and chambers that we have to come to expect in such caves. Of the animals that are painted or engraved on the walls, the most famous are those on the Polychrome Ceiling, which include a herd of bison and a couple of horses, a deer, and possibly other animals.
By 1979, one hundred fifty thousand annual tourists were visiting Altamira; it was named a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1985. The huge number of visitors had taken its toll on the paintings, however, because of the humidity from so many people breathing in a small space, as well as graffiti and other vandalism, all of which caused damage. Soon thereafter, the quota of visitors was limited to fewer than ten thousand per year. Eventually the cave was simply closed in 2002 and an exact replica of the cave was built nearby, which most tourists now visit; since 2015, only five randomly selected visitors are allowed in to the original cave for thirty-seven minutes once a week.
As for Lascaux, the story of its discovery is easily told. Four teenage boys and their dog, whose name was Robot for some reason, came upon the cave in 1940. They were walking on a hill above the town of Montignac in the region of Dordogne, near Bordeaux in southern France, and decided to explore a hole that they found—reportedly because their dog started digging in it and they thought it might contain buried treasure. We now know that it did contain buried treasure, but it was a treasure trove of art, not the treasure of gold that the boys were hoping for.
The cave is about six hundred fifty feet long, with at least six hundred paintings and another fifteen hundred engravings on the walls. It was named a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1979. It is interesting to note that, when Willard Libby was first experimenting with the technique of radiocarbon dating in 1947—which we will discuss in a future chapter—one of the first trials was done on a piece of charcoal that had been found at Lascaux. In part as a result of this technique, the cave is now generally dated to about seventeen thousand years ago, or 15,000 BCE.
The current entrance, and possibly the original entrance as well, leads into the huge Hall of the Bulls, which has four huge bulls painted on the cave wall, covering a total of more than five meters (16 feet). To be precise, these are aurochs, an extinct species of wild cattle. There also are smaller horses and tiny deer painted in the hall.
I’m not sure that it is possible for us to fully appreciate what it would have been like to enter this cave seventeen thousand years ago—no electricity, no tourist path, nothing to prevent you from stumbling into the darkness. We have to imagine grasping some sort of flaming torch and walking gingerly into the dark gaping mouth of the cave. The flickering light reveals new animals on the walls every few feet, but just beyond is inky blackness, terrifying and still. Even if you’re one of the artists who is responsible for some of the cave paintings, surely you had at least a small sense of dread each time you entered, placing one foot in front of another, jumping at the shadows of the frightening animals painted on the walls—even the ones that you painted a few years before, but especially those that had been done by the unnamed ones who came before you in the distant past.
From the Hall of Bulls, the path leads straight ahead into the Axial Gallery. This area has paintings of cattle, deer, and horses, including the so-called Chinese horses, which are not Chinese but are called that nevertheless, reportedly because of a vague resemblance to paintings of horses from the Sung dynasty in China (960–1279 CE).
If you turn to the right instead of going into the Axial Gallery, however, there is a passageway that has almost four hundred more engravings, mostly of horses. If you go right again from that point, the Great Apse appears, which has more than a thousand additional engravings on the walls. Lascaux also features the Chamber of the Felines, which has six large felines among dozens of other engravings.
The cave was never really excavated but was simply prepared for tourism and opened to the public in 1948. Having more than one hundred thousand annual visitors caused the same problems as at Altamira, only they were felt at Lascaux first. By 1963, the cave was closed to the public and only small groups were let in from then on. Problems still abound, though. In 2000, after the installation of a new air conditioning system, fungus began to grow on the walls and the images. In 2006 black mold began to grow as well. The damage is probably irreparable, which is why a replica of the cave has been built nearby, so that the public can visit it instead.
Chauvet is the oldest of the three caves that we are discussing, but it also is the most recently discovered. It is located in the Ardèche region of southern France. The huge cave may be as much as four hundred meters (thirteen hundred feet) long and covers more than eight thousand square meters. It was recently declared a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 2014, just twenty years after it was first discovered and explored in late December 1994 by Jean-Marie Chauvet and a small group of colleagues. Chauvet also has been brought to life by a three-dimensional movie produced by the famous director Werner Herzog that was released in 2011.
Chauvet cave painting
Nearly four thousand artifacts and animal bones have been found in the cave, as well as a thousand images on the walls. The drawings and paintings in it are simply exquisite. They include some of the earliest and best-preserved cave art in the world, depicting at least thirteen different species, ranging from lions, horses, and woolly rhinos to owls, mammoths, bears, and other animals. They also may include the oldest known images of an erupting volcano.
Discussions about their date have been heated. Until recently, the generally accepted dates from radiocarbon analysis, conducted on thirty to eighty samples over the years, put most of them at about 30,000 BCE, when the cave was thought to be have been first occupied. The cave was then abandoned for several thousand years, before being reoccupied in about 25,000 BCE, at which time dozens more paintings were added. There is also a child’s footprint that has been preserved on the soft clay floor of the cave, which probably dates from the second period of occupation. These dates have recently been challenged.
The newest study presents 259 radiocarbon dates, taken from the pigments used in the black paintings as well as bones and charcoal found in the cave, as well as nearly one hundred more dates derived using more esoteric techniques involving uranium-thorium, thermolu-minescence, and chlorine-36. These methods suggest that cave bears actually first began using the cave almost fifty thousand years ago, and the earliest paintings were created about 35,000 BCE. This phase ended in about 31,500 BCE, when both the bears and the people stopped using the cave. It was then abandoned for about twenty-five hundred years before being reoccupied by a new group of people, but not bears, from 29,000 BCE to 26,000 BCE. After that, a rockslide closed off the cave entrance so that neither people nor animals could enter from then on, until the cave was rediscovered in 1994.
The discovery of Chauvet Cave was not accidental, though. According to a detailed New Yorker article published in 2008, Jean-Marie Chauvet was a park ranger working for France’s Ministry of Culture and was actively searching for such caves. This particular cave is located high up on a limestone cliff above the former route of the Ardèche River. It is very close to a natural limestone bridge called the Pont d’Arc. Although the original entrance to the cave had been closed for at least twenty thousand years because of the rockslide, members of Chauvet’s group noticed cold air coming from a small opening on the cliff face.
The smallest member of the group, a woman named Éliette Brunel, climbed in after they had removed a few rocks to enlarge the opening. The others quickly followed her and used a chain ladder that they had brought to descend a deep thirty-foot shaft. They found themselves in a huge cavern, with stalagmites and stalactites everywhere. They noticed animal bones on the floor and then the first few paintings on the walls. Brunel yelled out, “They have been here!”—meaning Paleolithic cave painters.
In a Smithsonian article published in April 2015, Joshua Hammer reconstructed what happened next, using details from a 1996 memoir published by the explorers:
The trio moved gingerly across the earthen floor, trying not to tread on the crystallized ashes from an ancient fire pit, gazing in wonder at hundreds of images. “We found ourselves in front of a rock wall covered entirely with red ocher drawings. . . . The panel contained a mammoth with a long trunk, then a lion with red dots spattered around its snout in an arc, like drops of blood. We crouched on our heels, gazing at the cave wall, mute with stupefaction.”
There is some debate, and dispute, about exactly who was with Chauvet that day and whom he brought there soon afterward, as well as whether he was even the first to notice the small initial opening. Regardless, inside the cave they saw hundreds of drawings and paintings; some huge and some fairly small; some isolated and others painted as a group, overlapping as needed. They quickly alerted the authorities, who sent Jean Clottes, a specialist in cave paintings and a scientific adviser to the Ministry of Culture. Clottes declared it to be one of the great discoveries of the twentieth century.
Clottes assembled a team of specialists, who have been studying the Chauvet cave paintings ever since 1996. In all that time, the cave has remained closed to the public, in order to avoid the kinds of problems caused by opening the Lascaux and Altamira caves to tourists. In fact, even the research team enters the Chauvet cave only twice a year, for a few weeks in the spring and another few weeks in the fall. At all other times, a four-foot-tall locked steel door prevents anyone from entering. This is the only one of these three caves that has been excavated using modern methods.
The cave has a number of parts. The original entrance chamber, which is now sealed off from the outside by the ancient rockslide, leads into a huge area, named the Brunel Chamber, for Éliette Brunel, the first person to enter the cave in thousands of years. From here you can enter the Chamber of the Bear Hollows, which has a lot of evidence of occupation by cave bears, including hollows that they dug into the soft clay floor.
Two galleries can be reached from the bears’ chamber. One is a fairly short gallery called the Cactus Gallery. This one contains the first painting seen by Chauvet and his group—a small red mammoth painted on a rock—which was the painting that Éliette Brunel was looking at when she called out to the others.
The other gallery is much larger and leads to more chambers. This gallery is known as the Red Panels Gallery, since most of the paintings found here are in a series of panels on the eastern wall and are primarily painted in red.
From the Red Panels Gallery, one can go to the left (that is, west) and enter the Candle Gallery, which is the beginning of the second part of the cave system. After the Candle Gallery is the Hillaire Chamber, named for Christian Hillaire, the third member of the original trio who discovered the cave. This chamber is about thirty meters in diameter—so about one hundred feet wide—with a ceiling that is nearly as high. There are numerous wall paintings and drawings in it. Some of them overlap, probably meaning that they were created at different points in time. A natural calcite coating also covers a number of them, meaning that they cannot possibly be fakes, in case anyone was wondering.
From the Hillaire Chamber there are two choices. If you continue heading west, you’ll come to the Skull Chamber, where a bear skull was found very carefully placed on a stone that had fallen from the ceiling. Beyond the Skull Chamber is the final gallery in this direction, the Gallery of the Crosshatching, where a large horse is drawn on the rock.
If you continue north from the Hillaire Chamber instead of west, though, you enter the Megaloceros Gallery. There are drawings of several rhinoceroses in here, but the gallery gets its name from a drawing of a megaloceros, which is an extinct type of giant deer with huge antlers. The largest member of the megaloceros genus stood far taller than an average human and is known variously as an Irish elk, Irish deer, or giant elk.
French researchers proposed in early 2016 that a spray-shaped image in this gallery, partially covered by the drawing of the megaloceros, is possibly a representation of a nearby erupting volcano. The cave has at least two other, similar sets of images elsewhere, which have always been a mystery to scholars, but it now seems possible that all of them may be depicting the Bas-Vivarais volcanic field, which is only thirty-five kilometers from the cave and which had eruptions that took place between nineteen thousand and forty-three thousand years ago. That would include the time when the cave was occupied. If the researchers’ interpretation is correct, these images would be the earliest known representations of erupting volcanoes.
From the Megaloceros Gallery, you can proceed into the so-called End Chamber, where there are images of bison, rhinoceroses, mammoths, and large cats. There are so many here that they make up more than a third of all the images in the entire cave; one group consists of sixteen lions hunting a herd of bison. As in many cases throughout the whole cave, the artist or artists used features in the rock itself to make it look as if the animals were moving and alive.
On one side it is possible to go from the End Chamber into the Belvedere Gallery, which has no paintings but rather a small hole from which you can look back at the left wall of the End Chamber. The other side leads into the Sacristy, which has drawings of a horse, a big bison, a large cat, and a rhinoceros on the walls and lots of animal prints in the soft clay floor. At this point, the cave system comes to an end, at least as it is currently known.
In late April 2015, a replica of the Chauvet cave was opened up nearby. It cost 55 million Euros to build (approximately $63 million), but it allows the general public to finally see the amazing images painted on the walls and rocks of the original cave. Each of the images is an exact replica of the original, created by using three-dimensional models, digital images, and other techniques, ranging from scientific to artistic. The original limestone walls are now reproduced in concrete; the stalagmites and stalactites have been recreated in resin. Reportedly, the results are stunning.
Thus, all three of these caves—Lascaux, Altamira, and Chauvet—are now essentially closed off to the public, but the replicas that have been built at each of them are either attracting, or have the potential to attract, more visitors than the originals ever handled. For example, even at its height, Altamira cave had about one hundred fifty thousand visitors per year, but now the replica is reporting up to two hundred fifty thousand annual visitors.
Perhaps this is incentive to create more such replicas, just as has been done with King Tut’s tomb in Egypt, for many popular archaeological tourist destinations face the problem of preservation versus access. Far from “Disney-fying” the site, creating such identical replicas will allow many more members of the general public to enjoy these ancient wonders and leave the originals relatively untouched and able to be further studied by scientists.
Much has already been written about such art, including various hypotheses by scholars about why such Upper Paleolithic paintings were created in the first place, but much more remains to be done. It is clear that humans of thirty-five thousand years ago had enormous manual skills, understood both art and religion, and were more like us than different.
It also is clear that prehistoric archaeology is unique in allowing us to glimpse snapshots of hominin history, ranging from the three individuals who left their footprints in the ash at Laetoli in Tanzania several million years ago to more recent times when our early relatives were painting on cave walls in France and Spain. At this point our image of the human family tree has transformed so that it now looks more like a bush than a tree, with multiple hominin species inhabiting the planet at the same time. For example, we know that fifty thousand years ago there were humans and Neanderthals living together in Europe, as well as others whom we haven’t mentioned here, including Denisovans in Asia, “Hobbits” on Flores Island, and even, if the geneticists have it right, some as-yet-unidentified species that also added to the gene pool. It was only twenty-five thousand years ago that we emerged as the sole remaining species, with bits of each of these other species embedded in our DNA. This is a fast-moving field of research, with more discoveries made every year, and so it will be interesting to hear what is found next.
