Evidence that our Ice Age ancestors could appreciate music is tentative, unlike the vividly painted animals that register their love of graphic art, yet what seems to be a musical instrument still exists in southern France. In a cave at Pêche Merle a set of stalactites appears to have been worn down unnaturally, and when struck with a chamois-covered stick each column produces a different note. Ascribe this to chance or not, as you like.
At Le Tuc d’Audoubert, half a mile inside the cave, a pair of bison were modeled in high relief on a clay bank—the bull ready to mount the cow. The clay is now dry and deeply cracked, otherwise the animals seem unaffected by the millennia that have passed since they were formed. They surge with vitality. But the arresting thing about this tableau is not the elemental vigor of the bison or the skill with which they have been realized; more startling is the fact that the mud floor of the cave shows a ring of little heelprints, as though children had been dancing. In other words, these two animals were the central images of a ritual, a bison dance. And it is possible that the young dancers wore bison horns and pelts, just as in the eagle dance American Indians wear eagle feathers and represent themselves as eagles, circling, sweeping, fluttering.
Prehistorians agree that this grotto was the scene of a ritual, though some of them are not sure about the dancing; they favor a kind of backward march, a goose step in reverse, which is such an ugly concept that it may well be correct. Neither theory has been certified, however, so let’s assume the children were dancing.
In either case, why should this performance have been limited to children? The answer is fairly obvious. At an appropriate age each child was admitted to tribal membership, just as today the Church observes a rite of confirmation. Deep inside Le Tuc d’Audoubert these novitiates danced around a male and female bison, dancing from childhood toward the mysteries of adult life.
Not far away, in the cave known as Les Trois Frères, an entire wall iscovered with snowy owls, rabbits, fish, muskoxen, mammoths, and so on—with arrows flying toward them from every direction. This complicated mural may very well illustrate something of profound mystic significance. The numinous spirit of life, for instance. But probably what it represents is more immediate and understandable: Hunger. Meat for the table.
Sex and the stomach, remarks one anthropologist, such are the dominant themes of most philosophy.
Still, in this same cave, cut into the rock twelve feet above the ground with a stone knife, we find a very different philosopher—a prancing round-eyed antlered Wizard who gazes emptily down upon today. Something about the position of his hands is strangely terrible and important, but what does the gesture signify? What is he telling us? If only we knew. All we can be sure of is that he has dominated this wall for thousands of years, dressed in a stag’s pelt with the tail of a horse.
Less enigmatic and threatening than the Wizard of Les Frères is the ivory Venus of Lespugue, who now holds court not in her original cave but in a glass cabinet at the Musée de l’Homme in Paris, just a step from the Trocadéro métro. She is flanked by mirrors so that after pressing the minuterie button you have sixty seconds to contemplate her prodigious feminine melons, north and south. Unspeakably poised, tranquil as a water lily, this stained and fractured Aurignacian princess waits, more beguiling than your favorite movie actress. Modern sculpture seldom says as much.
Further evidence of man’s complex artistic roots turned up at La Genière, near Serrières-sur-Ain. Excavators came across a limestone plaque tucked into a layer of the Middle Stone Age, and on this limestone scrap had been engraved that popular subject the bison—engraved decisively, powerfully. Most unusual, however, was the fact that this one resembled a polychrome bison on a wall painting at Font-de-Gaume some 300 kilometers distant. So close indeed was the resemblance between these animals that the famous abbé-archaeologist Henri Breuil wrote: “. . . one is forced to consider the possibility that both are by the same hand. Who knows whether that small limestone plaque from Serrières could not have been a sketch for the wall painting. Or wasthe drawing of La Genière, on the other hand, just a souvenir of a pilgrimage.”
Did the artist who painted the wall at Font-de-Gaume carry his preliminary sketch all the way to La Genière? Or did a prehistoric tourist so greatly admire the mural that he, or she, bought or stole the sketch in order to take it home?
Both thoughts are surprising. Who could have imagined such artistic concern during the Stone Age?
Alas, regardless of ancient aesthetics, we are here confronted by a fake. Professor Viret of Lyon observed suspiciously: “On ne saurait pas manquer d’être frappé de la profondeur et de la régularité du sillon de la gravure.” In other words, authentic Stone Age engravings almost always are drawn softly, delicately, whereas the beast at La Genière had been delineated with deep regular strokes.
Professor Viret, troubled by this discrepancy, submitted the limestone bison for laboratory analysis, and beneath ultraviolet light one could see that the fluorescence of the line sharply differed from the fluorescence of the surface. This meant the engraving must be recent. Quite recent. And
