After visiting the Altamira cave in northern Spain, Pablo Picasso exclaimed: “After the work in Altamira, all art began to decline.” He wasn't joking. The art in this cave and in many other caves that are found in France, Spain and other countries is among the greatest artistic treasures that have ever been created.

Magura Cave

Magura Cave is one of the largest caves in Bulgaria. It is located in the northwestern part of the country. The cave walls are decorated with prehistoric cave paintings created approximately 8,000 to 4,000 years ago. More than 700 drawings were discovered. The drawings depict hunters, dancing people and many animals.

Cueva de las Manos

Cueva de las Manos is located in Southern Argentina. The name can be literally translated as “Cave of Hands”. Most of the images in the cave are left hands, but there are also hunting scenes and images of animals. The paintings are believed to have been created between 13,000 and 9,500 years ago.

Bhimbetka

Located in central India, Bhimbetka contains over 600 prehistoric rock art. The drawings depict people living in the cave at that time. The animals were also given a lot of space. Images of bison, tigers, lions and crocodiles were found. The oldest painting is believed to be 12,000 years old.

Serra da Capivara

Serra da Capivara is a national park in northeastern Brazil. This place is home to many stone shelters, which are decorated with rock paintings that represent ritual scenes, hunting, trees, animals. Some scientists believe that the oldest rock art in this park is from 25,000 years ago.

Laas Gaal

Laas Gaal is a complex of caves in northwestern Somalia that contain some of the earliest known art on the African continent. Prehistoric cave paintings are estimated by scientists to be between 11,000 and 5,000 years old. They show cows, ceremoniously dressed people, domestic dogs and even giraffes.

Tadrart Akakus

Tadrart Akakus forms a mountain range in the Sahara Desert, in western Libya. The area is famous for its rock art dating back to 12,000 BC. up to 100 years. The paintings reflect the changing conditions of the Sahara Desert. 9,000 years ago, the surrounding area was full of greenery and lakes, forests and wild animals, as evidenced by rock paintings depicting giraffes, elephants and ostriches.

Chauvet Cave

Chauvet Cave, in the south of France, contains some of the earliest known prehistoric cave paintings in the world. The images preserved in this cave may be about 32,000 years old. The cave was discovered in 1994 by Jean Marie Chauvet and his team of speleologists. The paintings found in the cave represent images of animals: mountain goats, mammoths, horses, lions, bears, rhinoceroses, lions.

Rock art of Kakadu

Located in the Northern Territory of Australia, National Park Kakadu contains one of the largest concentrations of Aboriginal art. The oldest works are believed to be 20,000 years old.

Altamira Cave

Discovered in the late 19th century, Altamira Cave is located in northern Spain. Surprisingly, the paintings found on the rocks were like this High Quality that scientists have long doubted their authenticity and even accused the discoverer, Marcelino Sanz de Sautuola, of forging the painting. Many people do not believe in the intellectual potential of primitive people. Unfortunately, the discoverer did not live to see 1902. In this mountain the paintings were recognized as authentic. The images were made with charcoal and ocher.

Paintings of Lascaux

The Lascaux Caves, located in southwest France, are decorated with impressive and famous cave paintings. Some of the images are 17,000 years old. Most of the rock paintings are depicted far from the entrance. The most famous images This cave contains images of bulls, horses and deer. The largest rock painting in the world is a bull in the Lascaux cave, which is 5.2 meters long.

Cave or rock paintings are drawings that are found on the walls and ceilings of caves and rock surfaces. Made during the prehistoric period, the images date back to the Paleolithic era, approximately 40,000 years ago. Some scientists believe that cave paintings of primitive people are a way of communicating with the outside world. According to another theory, the drawings were applied for ceremonial or religious purposes.

http://mydetionline.ru

History of discovery

In southwestern France and northern Spain, archaeologists have discovered more than 340 caves containing images from prehistoric times. Initially the age of the paintings was controversial issue, since the radiocarbon dating method may have been inaccurate due to the dirty surfaces that were examined. But further development technologies made it possible to establish the exact period of drawing images on the walls.

http://allkomp.ru/

The chronology can also be established by the themes of the drawings. Thus, the reindeer depicted in the Cueva de Las cave, which is located in Spain, dates back to the end of the Ice Age. The earliest drawings in Europe were discovered in the Chauvet Cave in France. They appeared 30,000 BC. The surprise for scientists was that the images had been altered many times over thousands of years, which caused confusion in the subsidization of the drawings.

Painting in three stages

There are monochrome and polychrome cave paintings. Polychrome rock painting was created in three stages and depended entirely on the experience and cultural maturity of the artist, lighting, type of surface and available raw materials. At the first stage, the contours of the depicted animal were outlined using charcoal, manganese or hematite. The second stage involved completing the drawing and applying red ocher or another pigment to the image. At the third stage, contours were drawn in black to visually enlarge the image.

Subjects and themes

The most common subject in the cave paintings of primitive people is the image of large wild animals. At the beginning of the Stone Age, artists painted:

• lviv;
• rhinoceroses;
• saber-toothed tigers;
• bears.

Images of animals hunted by people appear during the Late Paleolithic period. The image of a person is a very rare phenomenon and the pictures are less realistic than painted figures of animals. IN primitive art There are no images of landscapes or landscapes.

Work of ancient artists

Prehistoric inhabitants of the planet discovered that paint made from animals and plants was not as stable as paint extracted from the earth. Over time, people have determined the property of iron oxides in the ground not to lose their original appearance. Therefore, they looked for hematite deposits and could walk tens of kilometers a day to bring the dye home. Modern scientists have discovered paths leading to deposits along which ancient craftsmen plied.

Using sea shells as a reservoir for paint, working by candlelight or weak daylight, prehistoric painters used a variety of painting techniques and techniques. At first they painted with their fingers, and then moved on to crayons, moss pads, animal hair brushes, and plant fibers. They used a more advanced method of spraying paint using reeds or bones with special holes.

Holes were made in the bird's bones and filled with red ocher. By studying the cave paintings of ancient people, scientists have determined that such devices were used 16,000 BC. In the Stone Age, artists also used the techniques of chiaroscuro and foreshortening. In each era, new painting methods appear and the caves are replenished with drawings made in new styles over many centuries. The ingenious works of prehistoric artists have inspired many modern masters to create beautiful works.

The cave was discovered on December 18, 1994 in the south of France, in the Ardèche department, on the steep bank of the canyon of the river of the same name, a tributary of the Rhone, near the town of Pont d'Arc by three speleologists Jean-Marie Chauvet, Elette Brunel Deschamps and Christian Hillaire.

They all already had great experience exploration of caves, including those containing traces of prehistoric man. The half-buried entrance to the then unnamed cave was already known to them, but the cave had not yet been explored. When Elette, squeezing through the narrow opening, saw a large cavity going into the distance, she realized that she needed to return to the car for the stairs. It was already evening, they even doubted whether they should postpone further examination, but nevertheless they returned behind the stairs and went down into the wide passage.

The researchers stumbled upon a cave gallery, where a flashlight beam snatched an ocher spot on the wall from the darkness. It turned out to be a “portrait” of a mammoth. No other cave in the south-east of France, rich in “paintings,” can compare with the newly discovered one, named after Chauvet, either in size, or in the preservation and skill of the drawings, and the age of some of them reaches 30-33 thousand years.

Speleologist Jean-Marie Chauvet, after whom the cave got its name.

The discovery of the Chauvet cave on December 18, 1994 became a sensation, which not only delayed the emergence primitive drawings 5 thousand years ago, and also overturned the concept of the evolution of Paleolithic art that had developed by that time, based, in particular, on the classification of the French scientist Henri Leroy-Gourhan. According to his theory (as well as the opinion of most other experts), the development of art went from primitive forms to more complex ones, and then the earliest drawings from Chauvet should generally belong to the pre-figurative stage (dots, spots, stripes, winding lines, other scribbles) . However, researchers of Chauvet's paintings found themselves face to face with the fact that the oldest images are almost the most perfect in their execution from the Paleolithic ones known to us (Paleolithic is at least: it is not known what Picasso, who admired the Altamiran bulls, would have said if he had had a chance to see the lions and Chauvet bears!). Apparently art is not very friendly with evolutionary theory: avoiding any stages, it somehow inexplicably arises immediately, out of nothing, in highly artistic forms.

Here is what the largest expert in the field of Paleolithic art Z. A. Abramova writes about this: " Paleolithic art appears like a bright flash of flame in the depths of centuries. Having developed unusually quickly from the first timid steps to polychrome frescoes, this art just as abruptly disappeared. It does not find a direct continuation in subsequent eras... It remains a mystery how the Paleolithic masters achieved such high perfection and what were the paths along which echoes of the art of the Ice Age penetrated into Picasso’s brilliant work" (quoted from: Sher Ya. When and how did it arise art?).

(source - Donsmaps.com)

The drawing of black rhinoceroses from Chauvet is considered to be the oldest in the world (32,410 ± 720 years ago; there is information on the Internet about a certain “new” dating, giving Chauvet’s painting from 33 to 38 thousand years old, but without credible references).

On this moment, this is the oldest example of human creativity, the beginning of art, unencumbered by history. Typically, Paleolithic art is dominated by drawings of animals that people hunted - horses, cows, deer, and so on. The walls of Chauvet are covered with images of predators - cave lions, panthers, owls and hyenas. There are drawings depicting rhinoceros, tarpans and a number of other animals of the Ice Age.

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In addition, no other cave contains so many images of a woolly rhinoceros, an animal whose “dimensions” and strength are not inferior to a mammoth. In size and strength, the woolly rhinoceros was almost equal to the mammoth, its weight reached 3 tons, body length - 3.5 m, the size of the front horn - 130 cm. The rhinoceros became extinct at the end of the Pleistocene, earlier than the mammoth and the cave bear. Unlike mammoths, rhinoceroses were not herd animals. Probably because this powerful animal, although it was a herbivore, had the same vicious disposition as their modern relatives. This is evidenced by scenes of fierce “rock” fights between rhinoceroses from Chauvet.

The cave is located in the south of France, on the steep bank of the canyon of the Ardezh River, a tributary of the Rhone, in a very picturesque place, in the vicinity of the Pont d'Arc ("Arch Bridge"). This natural bridge is formed in the rock by a huge ravine up to 60 meters high.

The cave itself is "mothballed". Entrance to it is open exclusively to a limited circle of scientists. And even those are allowed to enter it only twice a year, in spring and autumn, and work there only for a couple of weeks, a few hours a day. Unlike Altamira and Lascaux, Chauvet has not yet been “cloned,” so ordinary people like you and me can only admire the reproductions, which we will certainly do, but a little later.

“In the fifteen years or more that have passed since the discovery, there have been many more people who have been to the summit of Everest than have seen these drawings,” writes Adam Smith in his review of documentary Werner Herzog on Chauvet. Haven't tested it, but sounds good.

So, the famous German film director somehow miraculously managed to get permission to film. The film "Cave of Forgotten Dreams" was shot in 3D and shown at the Berlin Film Festival in 2011, which, presumably, attracted the attention of the general public to Chauvet. It’s not good for us to lag behind the public.

Researchers agree that the caves containing such large numbers of drawings were clearly not intended for housing and did not represent prehistoric art galleries, but were sanctuaries, places for rituals, in particular, the initiation of young men entering the adult life(this is evidenced, for example, by preserved children’s footprints).

In the four “halls” of Chauvet, along with connecting passages with a total length of about 500 meters, more than three hundred perfectly preserved drawings depicting various animals, including large-scale multi-figure compositions, were discovered.

Elette Brunel Deschamps and Christian Hillaire - participants in the discovery of the Chauvet Cave.

The paintings also answered the question: did tigers or lions live in prehistoric Europe? It turned out to be the second. Ancient drawings of cave lions always show them without a mane, which suggests that, unlike their African or Indian relatives, they either did not have one, or it was not as impressive. Often these images show the characteristic tuft on the tail of lions. The coloring of the fur, apparently, was one color.

Paleolithic art mostly features drawings of animals from the “menu” of primitive people - bulls, horses, deer (although this is not entirely accurate: it is known, for example, that for the inhabitants of Lascaux the main “forage” animal was the reindeer, while on It is found in single copies on the walls of the cave). In general, one way or another, commercial ungulates predominate. Chauvet is unique in this sense because of the abundance of images of predators - cave lions and bears, as well as rhinoceroses. It makes sense to dwell on the latter in more detail. Such a number of rhinoceroses as in Chauvet has never been found in any other cave.

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It is noteworthy that the first “artists” to leave their mark on the walls of some Paleolithic caves, including Chauvet, were... bears: in some places the engravings and paintings were applied directly on top of the traces of powerful claws, the so-called griffads.

In the late Pleistocene, at least two species of bears could coexist: brown bears survived safely to this day, and their relatives, cave bears (large and small) died out, unable to adapt to the damp gloom of caves. The big cave bear wasn't just big - it was huge. Its weight reached 800-900 kg, the diameter of the skulls found is about half a meter. A person most likely could not emerge victorious from a fight with such an animal in the depths of a cave, but some zoological experts are inclined to assume that, despite its terrifying size, this animal was slow, non-aggressive and did not pose a real danger.

An image of a cave bear made with red ocher in one of the first halls.

The oldest Russian paleozoologist, Professor N.K. Vereshchagin believes that “among Stone Age hunters, cave bears were a kind of meat cattle that did not require care for grazing and feeding.” The appearance of a cave bear is conveyed in Chauvet more clearly than anywhere else. It seems that it played a special role in the life of primitive communities: the beast was depicted on rocks and pebbles, its figurines were sculpted from clay, its teeth were used as pendants, the skin probably served as a bed, and the skull was preserved for ritual purposes. Thus, in Chauvet a similar skull was discovered resting on a rocky base, which most likely indicates the existence of a bear cult.

The woolly rhinoceros became extinct a little earlier than the mammoth (according to different sources from 15-20 to 10 thousand liters. AD), and, at least, in the drawings of the Magdalenian period (15-10 thousand years BC) it almost never appears. In Chauvet, we generally see a two-horned rhinoceros with larger horns, without any traces of fur. This may be the Merka rhinoceros, which lived in southern Europe, but is much rarer than its woolly relative. The length of its front horn could be up to 1.30 m. In short, it was a monster.

There are practically no images of people. Only chimera-like figures are found - for example, a man with the head of a bison. No traces of human habitation were found in the Chauvet Cave, but in some places the footprints of the cave's primitive visitors were preserved on the floor. According to researchers, the cave was a place for magical rituals.

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Previously, researchers believed that several stages could be distinguished in the development of primitive painting. At first the drawings were very primitive. The skill came later, with experience. More than one thousand years had to pass for the drawings on the walls of the caves to reach their perfection.

Chauvet's discovery shattered this theory. French archaeologist Jean Clotte, having carefully examined Chauvet, stated that our ancestors probably learned to draw even before moving to Europe. And they arrived here about 35,000 years ago. The most ancient images from the Chauvet cave are very perfect works of painting, in which you can see perspective, chiaroscuro, and different angles etc.

Interestingly, the artists of the Chauvet Cave used methods that were not applicable anywhere else. Before applying the design, the walls were scraped and leveled. Ancient artists first scratched the outlines of the animal and used paint to give them the necessary volume. “The people who painted this were great artists,” confirms French rock art specialist Jean Clotte.

A detailed study of the cave will take several decades. However, it is already clear that its total length is more than 500 m at one level, the ceiling height is from 15 to 30 m. There are four consecutive “halls” and numerous side branches. In the first two rooms, the images are made in red ocher. The third contains engravings and black figures. There are many bones of ancient animals in the cave, and in one of the halls there are traces of the cultural layer. About 300 images were found. The painting is perfectly preserved.

(source - Flickr.com)

There is an assumption that such images with multiple contours layered on top of each other are a kind of primitive animation. When a torch was quickly moved along the drawing in a cave immersed in darkness, the rhinoceros “came to life”, and one can imagine the effect this had on the cave “spectators” - “The Arrival of a Train” by the Lumiere brothers is resting.

There are other considerations in this regard. For example, that in this way a group of animals is depicted in perspective. Nevertheless, the same Herzog in his film adheres to “our” version, and he can be trusted in matters of “moving pictures”.

Chauvet Cave is currently closed to public access because any noticeable change in air humidity could damage the wall paintings. Only a few archaeologists can gain access, for only a few hours and subject to restrictions. The cave has been cut off from the outside world since the Ice Age due to the fall of a rock in front of its entrance.

The drawings of the Chauvet cave amaze with their knowledge of the laws of perspective (overlapping drawings of mammoths) and the ability to put shadows - until now it was believed that this technique was discovered several thousand years later. And an eternity before Seurat had the idea, primitive artists discovered pointillism: the image of one animal, it seems, a bison, consists entirely of red dots.

But the most surprising thing is that, as already mentioned, artists give preference to rhinoceroses, lions, cave bears and mammoths. Typically, the models for rock art were the animals that were hunted. “From the entire bestiary of that era, artists choose the most predatory, most dangerous animals,” says archaeologist Margaret Conkey of the University of Berkeley in California. By depicting animals that were clearly not on the menu of Paleolithic cuisine, but symbolized danger, strength, and power, artists, according to Klott, “understood their essence.”

Archaeologists paid attention to exactly how the images were included in the wall space. In one of the rooms, a cave bear is depicted in red ocher without the lower part of its body, so that it appears, says Klott, “as if it were coming out of the wall.” In the same room, archaeologists also discovered images of two stone goats. The horns of one of them are natural crevices in the wall, which the artist widened.

Image of a horse in a niche (source - Donsmaps.com)

Rock painting clearly played a significant role in spiritual life prehistoric people. This can be confirmed by two large triangles (symbols of femininity and fertility?) and an image of a creature with human legs, but with the head and body of a bison. Probably, Stone Age people hoped in this way to appropriate at least partially the power of animals. The cave bear, apparently, occupied a special position. 55 bear skulls, one of which lies on a fallen boulder, as if on an altar, suggest the cult of this beast. Which also explains the choice of Chauvet Cave by the artists - dozens of potholes in the floor indicate that this was the hibernation site of giant bears.

Ancient people came again and again to look at the rock paintings. The 10-meter-long “horse panel” shows traces of soot left by torches that were mounted in the wall after it was covered with painting. These marks, according to Conkey, are on top of a layer of mineralized sediments covering the images. If painting is the first step on the path to spirituality, then the ability to appreciate it is undoubtedly the second.

At least 6 books and dozens of scientific articles have been published about the Chauvet Cave, not counting sensational materials in the general press, four large albums of beautiful color illustrations with accompanying text have been published and translated into major European languages. The documentary film “Cave of Forgotten Dreams 3D” will be released in Russian theaters on December 15. The director of the film is German Werner Herzog.

Picture "Cave of Forgotten Dreams" appreciated at the 61st Berlin Film Festival. More than a million people went to see the film. This is the highest-grossing documentary film in 2011.

According to new data, the age of the coal used to paint the pictures on the wall of the Chauvet cave is 36,000 years old, and not 31,000, as previously thought.

Refined radiocarbon dating methods show that the settlement modern man(Homo sapiens) Central and Western Europe began 3 thousand years earlier than thought, and happened faster. The time of cohabitation between sapiens and Neanderthals in most parts of Europe was reduced from about 10 to 6 thousand years or less. The final disappearance of European Neanderthals may also have occurred several millennia earlier.

The famous British archaeologist Paul Mellars published a review latest achievements in the development of radiocarbon dating, which led to significant changes our ideas about the chronology of events that took place more than 25 thousand years ago.

The accuracy of radiocarbon dating in last years increased sharply due to two circumstances. Firstly, methods have emerged for high-quality purification of organic substances, primarily collagen isolated from ancient bones, from all foreign impurities. When it comes to very ancient samples, even an insignificant admixture of foreign carbon can lead to serious distortions. For example, if a 40,000-year-old sample contained only 1% modern carbon, this would reduce the “radiocarbon age” by as much as 7,000 years. As it turned out, most ancient archaeological finds contain such impurities, so their age was systematically underestimated.

The second source of errors, which was finally eliminated, is related to the fact that the content of the radioactive isotope 14C in the atmosphere (and, consequently, in organic matter formed in different eras) is not constant. The bones of people and animals that lived during periods of high levels of 14C in the atmosphere initially contained more of this isotope than expected, and therefore their age was again underestimated. In recent years, a number of extremely precise measurements have been made that have made it possible to reconstruct the fluctuations of 14C in the atmosphere over the past 50 millennia. For this, unique marine deposits were used in some areas of the World Ocean, where sediment accumulated very quickly, Greenland ice, cave stalagmites, coral reefs, etc. In all these cases, it was possible for each layer to compare radiocarbon dates with others obtained on the basis ratio of oxygen isotopes 18O/16O or uranium and thorium.

As a result, correction scales and tables were developed that dramatically increased the accuracy of radiocarbon dating of samples older than 25 thousand years. What did the updated dates tell us?

It was previously believed that modern humans (Homo sapiens) appeared in southeastern Europe approximately 45,000 years ago. From here they gradually settled in a western and northwestern direction. The peopling of Central and Western Europe continued, according to “uncorrected” radiocarbon dates, for approximately 7 thousand years (43-36 thousand years ago); the average rate of advancement is 300 meters per year. Refined dating shows that settlement occurred faster and began earlier (46-41 thousand years ago; advancement speed up to 400 meters per year). At about the same speed, agricultural culture later spread in Europe (10-6 thousand years ago), also coming from the Middle East. It is curious that both waves of settlement followed two parallel paths: the first along the Mediterranean coast from Israel to Spain, the second along the Danube Valley, from the Balkans to Southern Germany and further to Western France.

In addition, it turned out that the period of cohabitation modern people and Neanderthals in most areas of Europe was significantly shorter than thought (not 10,000 years, but only about 6,000), and in some areas, for example in western France, even less - only 1-2 thousand years. According to updated dating , some of the brightest examples of cave painting turned out to be much older than thought; the beginning of the Aurignac era, marked by the appearance of various complex products made of bone and horn, also moved into the depths of time (41,000 thousand years ago according to new ideas).

Paul Mellars believes that previously published datings of the latest Neanderthal sites (in Spain and Croatia; both sites, according to “unspecified” radiocarbon dating, are 31-28 thousand years old) also need to be revised. In reality, these finds are most likely several thousand years older.

All this shows that the indigenous Neanderthal population of Europe fell to the onslaught of the Middle Eastern newcomers much faster than thought. The superiority of the Sapiens - technological or social - was too great, and neither the physical strength of the Neanderthals, nor their endurance, nor their adaptability to the cold climate could save the doomed race.

Chauvet's painting is amazing in many ways. Take, for example, camera angles. It's common for cave artists was to depict animals in profile. Of course, here too this is typical for most of the drawings, but there are breakthroughs, as in the above fragment, where the buffalo’s face is shown in three-quarters. In the following picture you can also see a rare image from the front:

Maybe this is an illusion, but a distinct feeling of composition is created - the lions are sniffing in anticipation of prey, but have not yet seen the bison, and it has clearly tensed and frozen, feverishly wondering where to run. True, judging by the dull look, he doesn’t think well.

Remarkable running bison:

(source - Donsmaps.com)

Moreover, the “face” of each horse is purely individual:

(source - istmira.com)

The following panel with horses is probably the most famous and widely circulated of Chauvet’s images:

(source - popular-archaeology.com)

In the recently released science fiction film “Prometheus,” the cave, which promises the discovery of an extraterrestrial civilization that once visited our planet, is copied completely from Chauvet, including this wonderful group, which includes people who are completely inappropriate here.

Still from the film “Prometheus” (dir. R. Scott, 2012)

You and I know that there are no people on the walls of Chauvet. What is not there is not. There are bulls.

(source - Donsmaps.com)

During the Pliocene and especially in the Pleistocene, ancient hunters exerted significant pressure on nature. The idea that the extinction of the mammoth, woolly rhinoceros, cave bear, and cave lion is associated with warming and the end of the Ice Age was first questioned by the Ukrainian paleontologist I.G. Pidoplichko, who expressed what seemed at the time a seditious hypothesis that man was to blame for the extinction of the mammoth. Later discoveries confirmed the validity of these assumptions. The development of radiocarbon analysis methods showed that the last mammoths ( Elephas primigenius) lived at the very end of the Ice Age, and in some places lived until the beginning of the Holocene. At the Predmost site of Paleolithic man (Czechoslovakia), the remains of a thousand mammoths were found. There are known massive finds of mammoth bones (more than 2 thousand individuals) at the Volchya Griva site near Novosibirsk, dating back 12 thousand years. The last mammoths in Siberia lived only 8-9 thousand years ago. The destruction of the mammoth as a species is undoubtedly the result of the activities of ancient hunters.

An important character in Chauvet's paintings was the big-horned deer.

The art of Upper Paleolithic animalists serves, along with paleontological and archaeozoological finds, as an important source of information about what animals our ancestors hunted. Until recently, the Late Paleolithic drawings from the caves of Lascaux in France (17 thousand years old) and Altamira in Spain (15 thousand years old) were considered the oldest and most complete, but later the Chauvet caves were discovered, which gives us a new range of images of the mammal fauna of that time. Along with relatively rare drawings of a mammoth (among them an image of a baby mammoth, strikingly reminiscent of one discovered in permafrost Magadan region baby mammoth Dima) or alpine ibex ( Capra ibex) there are many images of two-horned rhinoceroses, cave bears ( Ursus spelaeus), cave lions ( Panthera spelaea), Tarpanov ( Equus gmelini).

The images of rhinoceroses in the Chauvet Cave raise many questions. This is undoubtedly not a woolly rhinoceros - the drawings depict a two-horned rhinoceros with larger horns, without traces of fur, with a pronounced skin fold, characteristic of the living species of the one-horned Indian rhinoceros ( Rhinocerus indicus). Perhaps this is Merck's rhinoceros ( Dicerorhinus kirchbergensis), who lived in southern Europe until the end of the Late Pleistocene? However, if from the woolly rhinoceros, which was the object of hunting in the Paleolithic and disappeared by the beginning of the Neolithic, quite numerous remains of skin with hair, horny growths on the skull have been preserved (in Lvov there is even the only stuffed animal of this species in the world), then from the Merck rhinoceros we have only bone remains, and the keratin “horns” were not preserved. Thus, the discovery in Chauvet Cave poses the question: what type of rhinoceros was known to its inhabitants? Why are the rhinoceroses from Chauvet Cave depicted in herds? It is very likely that Paleolithic hunters were also to blame for the disappearance of the Merck rhinoceros.

Paleolithic art does not know the concepts of good and evil. Both the peacefully grazing rhinoceros and the lions ambushed are parts of a single nature, from which the artist himself does not separate himself. Of course, you can’t get into the head of a Cro-Magnon man and you can’t talk “for life” when you meet, but I am close and, at least, understandable to the idea that art at the dawn of humanity is not in any way opposed to nature, man is in harmony with the world around him. Every thing, every stone or tree, not to mention animals, is viewed by him as carrying meaning, as if the whole world were a huge living museum. At the same time, there is no reflection yet, and questions of existence are not raised. This is such a pre-cultural, heavenly state. We, of course, will not be able to feel it fully (as well as return to heaven), but suddenly we will be able to at least touch it, communicating through tens of thousands of years with the authors of these amazing creations

We don’t see them vacationing alone. Always hunting, and always with almost a whole pride.

Admiration is generally understandable primitive man surrounding him with huge, strong and fast animals, be it a big-horned deer, a bison or a bear. It’s even somehow absurd to put yourself next to them. He didn't bet. There is much to learn from us who fill our virtual “caves” with our own or family photos in immeasurable quantities. Yes, something, but narcissism was not characteristic of the first people. But the same bear was depicted with the greatest care and trepidation:

The gallery ends with the strangest drawing in Chauvet, definitely of cult purpose. It is located in the farthest corner of the grotto and is made on a rocky ledge, which has (for good reason, presumably) a phallic shape

In literature, this character is usually referred to as a “sorcerer” or taurocephalus. In addition to the bull's head, we see another one, a lion's, female legs and a deliberately enlarged size, let’s say, the womb, which forms the center of the entire composition. Compared to their colleagues in the Paleolithic workshop, the craftsmen who painted this sanctuary look like pretty avant-garde artists. We know individual images of the so-called. “Venus”, male sorcerers in the form of animals and even scenes hinting at the intercourse of an ungulate with a woman, but in order to mix all of the above so thickly... It is assumed (see, for example, http://www.ancient-wisdom.co.uk/ francech auvet.htm) that image female body was the earliest, and the heads of the lion and bull were painted later. It is interesting that there is no overlap of later drawings with previous ones. Obviously, maintaining the integrity of the composition was part of the artist’s plans.

, and also look again at And

The discovery of an ancient rock painting in a cave in Gibraltar, which scientists believe was made by Neanderthals about 39,000 years ago, has become a sensation in the scientific world. If the discovery turns out to be true, then history will have to be rewritten, because it turns out that Neanderthals were not at all primitively stupid savages, as is commonly believed today. In our review of ten unique rock paintings that were found in different time and created a real sensation in the world of science.

1. White Shaman's Rock

This 4,000-year-old ancient rock art is located in the lower Peco River in Texas. The giant image (3.5 m) shows the central figure surrounded by other people performing some kind of rituals. It is assumed that the figure of a shaman is depicted in the center, and the picture itself depicts the cult of some forgotten ancient religion.

2. Kakadu Park

Kakadu National Park is one of the most... beautiful places for tourists in Australia. It is especially valued by its rich cultural heritage- The park contains an impressive collection of local Aboriginal art. Some of the rock art at Kakadu (which has been designated a UNESCO World Heritage Site) is almost 20,000 years old.

3. Chauvet Cave

Another UNESCO World Heritage Site is located in the south of France. More than 1000 different images can be found in the Chauvet Cave, most of them are animals and anthropomorphic figures. These are some of the most ancient images known to man: their age dates back to 30,000 – 32,000 years. About 20,000 years ago, the cave was filled with stones and has remained in excellent condition to this day.

4. Cueva de El Castillo

In Spain, the “Castle Cave” or Cueva de El Castillo was recently discovered, on the walls of which the oldest cave paintings in Europe were found, their age is 4,000 years older than all the rock paintings that were previously found in the Old World. Most of the images feature handprints and simple geometric shapes, although there are also images of strange animals. One of the drawings, a simple red disk, was made 40,800 years ago. It is assumed that these paintings were made by Neanderthals.

5. Laas Gaal

Some of the oldest and best-preserved rock paintings on the African continent can be found in Somalia, at the Laas Gaal (Camel Well) cave complex. Despite the fact that their age is “only” 5,000 – 12,000 years, these rock paintings are perfectly preserved. They depict mainly animals and people in ceremonial clothing and various decorations. Unfortunately this one is wonderful cultural site cannot receive World Heritage status because it is located in an area constantly at war.

6. Bhimbetka Cliff Dwellings

The cliff dwellings at Bhimbetka represent some of the earliest traces of human life on the Indian subcontinent. In natural rock shelters on the walls there are drawings that are about 30,000 years old. These paintings represent the period of development of civilization from the Mesolithic to the end of prehistoric times. The drawings depict animals and people engaged in daily activities such as hunting, religious ceremonies and, interestingly, dancing.

7. Magura

In Bulgaria, the rock paintings found in the Magura cave are not very old - they are between 4,000 and 8,000 years old. They are interesting because of the material that was used to apply the images - guano (droppings) bat. In addition, the cave itself was formed millions of years ago and other archaeological artifacts, such as the bones of extinct animals (for example, the cave bear).

8. Cueva de las Manos

The "Cave of Hands" in Argentina is famous for its extensive collection of prints and images of human hands. This rock painting dates back to 9,000 - 13,000 years. The cave itself (more precisely, the cave system) was used by ancient people 1,500 years ago. Also in Cueva de las Manos you can find various geometric shapes and images of hunting.

9. Altamira Cave

The paintings found in the Altamira Cave in Spain are considered masterpieces of ancient culture. The stone paintings from the Upper Paleolithic period (14,000 – 20,000 years old) are in exceptional condition. As in Chauvet Cave, a landslide sealed the entrance to this cave about 13,000 years ago, so the images remained intact. In fact, these drawings are so well preserved that when they were first discovered in the 19th century, scientists thought they were fakes. It took a long time until technology made it possible to confirm the authenticity of rock art. Since then, the cave has proved so popular among tourists that it had to be closed in the late 1970s because a large number of Carbon dioxide from the breath of visitors began to lead to the destruction of the painting.

10. Lascaux Cave

This is by far the best known and most significant collection rock art in the world. Some of the most beautiful 17,000-year-old paintings in the world can be found in this cave system in France. They are very complex, very carefully made and at the same time perfectly preserved. Unfortunately, the cave was closed more than 50 years ago due to the fact that, under the influence of carbon dioxide exhaled by visitors, the unique images began to collapse. In 1983, a reproduction of part of the cave called Lascaux 2 was discovered.

Of great interest are also. They will be of interest not only to professional historians and art critics, but also to anyone interested in history.

On December 18, 1994, the famous French speleologist Jean Marie Chauvet discovered a cave gallerycancient images of animals. The discovery was named in honor of its discoverer — Chauvet cave. We decided to talk about the most beautiful caves with rock paintings.

Chauvet Cave

The discovery of the Chauvet Cave in the south of France near the town of Pont d'Arc became a scientific sensation that forced us to reconsider the existing understanding of the art of ancient people: it was previously believed that primitive painting developed in stages. At first, the images were very primitive, and more than one thousand years had to pass for the drawings on the walls of the caves to reach their perfection. Chauvet's find suggests the opposite: the age of some images is 30-33 thousand years, which means that our ancestors learned to draw even before moving to Europe. The discovered rock art represents one of the oldest examples of cave art in the world, in particular, the drawing of black rhinoceroses from Chauvet is still considered the most ancient. The south of France is rich in such caves, but none of them can compare with the Chauvet Cave either in size, or in the preservation and skill of the drawings. Mostly animals are depicted on the walls of the cave: panthers, horses, deer, as well as woolly rhinoceros, tarpan, cave lion and other animals of the Ice Age. In total, 13 images were found in the cave. various types animals.
Now the cave is closed to tourists, as changes in air humidity can damage the images. Archaeologists can only work in a cave for a few hours a day. Today the Chauvet Cave is national treasure France.

Caves of Nerja

The Caves of Nerja are an amazingly beautiful series of huge caves near the city of Nerja in Andalusia, Spain. They received the nickname "Prehistoric Cathedral". They were discovered by accident in 1959. They are one of the main attractions of Spain. Some of their galleries are open to the public, and one of them, which forms a natural amphitheater and has excellent acoustics, even hosts concerts. In addition to the world's largest stalagmite, several mysterious drawings. Experts believe that seals or fur seals are depicted on the walls. Fragments of charcoal were found near the drawings, radiocarbon dating which gave an age between 43,500 and 42,300 years. If experts prove that the images were made with this charcoal, the seals of the Nerja Cave will turn out to be significantly older than the cave paintings from the Chauvet Cave. This will once again confirm the assumption that Neanderthals had the ability for creative imagination no less than that of Homo sapiens.

Kapova Cave (Shulgan-Tash)

This karst cave was found in Bashkiria, on the Belaya River, in the area of ​​which the Shulgan-Tash nature reserve is now located. This is one of the longest caves in the Urals. Cave paintings of ancient people from the Late Paleolithic era, the likes of which can only be found in very limited places in Europe, were discovered in Kapova Cave in 1959. Images of mammoths, horses and other animals are made mainly with ocher, a natural pigment based on animal fat, their age is about 18 thousand years. There are several charcoal drawings. In addition to animals, there are images of triangles, stairs, and oblique lines. The most ancient drawings dating back to early paleolithic, are situated in upper tier. On the lower tier of the Kapova Cave there are later images of the Ice Age. The drawings are also notable for the fact that human figures are shown without the realism inherent in the animals depicted. Researchers suggest that the images were made in order to appease the “gods of the hunt.” In addition, cave paintings are designed to be perceived from more than one certain point, and from several angles of view. To preserve the drawings, the cave was closed to the public in 2012, but an interactive kiosk was installed in the museum on the territory of the reserve for everyone to look at the drawings virtually.

Cueva de las Manos cave

Cueva de las Manos (“Cave of Many Hands”) is located in Argentina, in the province of Santa Cruz. Cueva de las Manos became world famous in 1964 thanks to the research of archeology professor Carlos Gradin, who discovered many wall paintings and human handprints in the cave, the oldest of which date back to the 9th millennium BC. e. More than 800 prints, overlapping each other, form a multi-colored mosaic. Until scientists came to unanimous opinion about the meaning of the images of hands, from which the cave got its name. Mostly left hands were captured: out of 829 prints, only 36 were right hands. Moreover, according to some researchers, the hands belong to teenage boys. Most likely, drawing an image of one’s hand was part of the initiation rite. In addition, scientists have built a theory about how such clear and clear handprints were obtained: apparently, a special composition was taken into the mouth and forcefully blown through a tube onto a hand attached to the wall. In addition to handprints, on the walls of the cave there are depictions of people, rhea ostriches, guanacos, cats, geometric figures with ornaments, and hunting processes (the pictures show the use of bolas, a traditional throwing weapon of the Indians South America) and observations of the sun. In 1999 the cave was included in the list World Heritage UNESCO.