Cro-Magnon Cave Art: Makes You Realize How Smart Cavemen and Cavewomen Were...

I just got back from a two week trip through Southern France on an archeological tour visiting a dozen+ caves of 20,000 to 50,000 year old cave paintings.?It was quite the excursion as I reflect on the amazing cave and rock art from our early ancestors.

The Caves and the Art Work

In Southern France (between Bordeaux and Lyon) there are hundreds of caves that have artwork dating back 20,000 to 50,000 years old, from scratches on the limestone walls to full color paintings. Southern France has a lot of these preserved caves because of the geology of the area (lots of old limestone, that created a lot of caves, that were exposed and used for shelter during early human and Neanderthal times that happened to have gotten buried over during the various ice ages that sealed and preserved these caves for thousands of years, only to be rediscovered in the past 200 years).

Each cave we visited was a little different, with some that were just 20-50 feet long like Pair non Pair (26,000-33,000 year old engraved cave art with bone tools and jewelry found inside), or Font de Gaume (a Paleolithic cave with over 200 multi-color paintings of mammoths, horses, bison, and deer).

One of the caves, Rouffignac, required us to take an electric train 15 minutes into the back of the cave known as the "Cave of the Hundred Mammoths" with over 250 engravings and paintings dating back to around 14,000 years ago.

The photo below is the cave map of Pech Merle cave that was so big that after an hour we only saw about a quarter of the cave's 29,000 year old full color wall paintings along with very unique ancient human handprints stenciled on the walls...

Who Did This Cave Art?

The people who did this cave art were our ancestors, and while Neanderthals roamed this area of Europe during the same time period, paleontologists generally agree that the cave wall carvings and paintings were of early Homo sapiens because of buried skeletal remains, rock tools, and other objects found in the caves that date to the same time as the dating of the wall paintings (the black paint used in the paintings were made from soot that has been carbon dated, that match the carbon dating of the skeletal bones buried at the sites).

You might hear the name Cro-Magnon in reference to these paintings as skeletal bones were found in 1868 in a cave at a location called Cro-Magnon in Southern France in the region where all these cave carvings and paintings exist. But in the past 150-years, paleontologists have concluded that the Cro-Magnon skeleton was a Homo sapien, and thus the same species as all of us on earth.

In fact over the past 100,000 years, the earth has been populated with several sub-species of hominids including our direct ancestors (we're known as Homo sapiens) as well as extinct sub-species like Neanderthals and Denisovans, which interestingly ALL humans on the planet other than a few on the African continent, we all have between 1.5-4% Neanderthal and Denisovan DNA! So whether you are from European, Asian, Hispanic, Middle Eastern, Indian, Native American, African or other descent, we ALL have the DNA from the ancient interbreeding between subspecies that roamed the planet thousands of years ago.

Cave Art is More than Pretty Pictures

What became clear after visiting cave after cave, and seeing amazing pieces of cave wall art and carvings, most hundreds of feet back into these long deep caves is that our ancestors weren't these dull, grunting, stick yielding "cavemen" depicted in movies or cartoons we may have seen in the past.

These people had to figure out how to use and manage fire for lighting to illuminate the walls deep deep into these caves. They had to know how to create paint pigments from crushed minerals, soot, and plants that have survived tens of thousands of years in damp caves. A single oil lamp by an individual would not have been enough light to paint huge murals on walls and ceilings, a group of individuals would have had to work together, to cooperate in bringing in lighting but also likely food and water to spend hours getting thousands of feet back into these caves, do their painting, and then safely exit the caves. (it's likely they did not "live" way back in the caves as they would have had to burn a lot of wood to keep the spaces lit continuously, and there's no sign of extensive charcoal on the floors nor soot caked into the walls or ceilings, so those who painted the walls were in and out for their work, not long time deep cave dwellers)

Our guide along the cave trek was Jean-Michel Geneste, the curator of the famous Lascaux Cave, and the Curator General of Cultural Heritage for the country of France. No one knows these caves and the history better... (picture below Jean-Michel and my 10yr old son in front of the passage door to Commarque Cave, closed to the public, one of many we got to visit...)

The ancient artists of these cave walls must have had "free time" to spend days doing their paintings, and thus must have lived a relatively stable lifestyle with plentiful food, water, clothing, and other basic life resources. (unlike nomadic tribes or stressed hunter-gatherer communities that spend countless hours each day simply collecting water and scavenging for food to subsist, these early humans from 25,000, 30,000, or 45,000 years ago had time to spare to do these paintings, which means they lived way more sophisticated lifestyles than we might have credited them for).

Wrap Up

The period 20,000-50,000 was a time of ice ages and wooly mammoths, but a clear marker where we as a human species transformed from an opportunistic hunter gatherer community to thoughtful, cooperative, communicative, creative beings.

We gained the basic skills that soon after led our ancestors to create bronze and iron tools, build pyramids and create civilizations, written language, and populate all corners of our globe.

Our ancestors managed droughts, famine, hardships, and climate change over tens of thousands of years. Having seen the handiwork, it's clear they knew how to cooperate, communicate, and work together in ways that hopefully here in the 21st century we are still smart enough to adapt, cooperate, and survive in the changing world ahead of us.