Explore the caves of Pesch Merle, Font de Gaume and Ruffignac in the south of France, be sure to check out their Spanish counterparts, and enjoy some wonderful examples of fine art. Herds of horses, mammoths, giant bulls, rhinos, lions emerge from the darkness …
Many symbols of the "alphabet" are repeated on the walls of caves for thousands of years
Many animals are depicted in vivid colors, anatomically accurate and with a knowledge of perspective, which speaks of the great skill of ancient artists. “We have not come up with anything new,” Pablo Picasso remarked in 1940 after visiting the Lascaux cave.
The paintings on the walls of the Ruffignac Cave are 13 thousand years old, the neighboring Lascaux and Chauvet store even older samples - they are about 30 thousand years old. They say that hunters and gatherers were able to represent the world around them in a very complex way.
The paintings are accompanied by mysterious signs, and it is not surprising that a number of researchers hypothesized that these are not simple squiggles and handprints. Some are collected in groups, others appear one or two at a time, while others are mixed with images of animals. You can distinguish between triangles, squares, circles, semicircles, open corners, crosses, and point groups. There are also more complex ones: hands with curved fingers (so-called negative hands), rows of parallel lines (finger flutes), symbols of trees (penniforms) and huts (tectiforms), etc. In total, 26 symbols have been repeatedly used over the millennia.
Genevieve von Pezinger of the University of Victoria, Canada, believes that many of these signs arose from the simplification of realistic depictions. For example, a horse eventually reduced to the wavy line of its back, which eventually began to denote this animal.
But symbolism, which became the main style of later art, was neither the only result nor the goal of such simplifications. Ms von Pezinger and her colleagues cataloged signs found in more than 200 caves and other ancient sites in France and Italy. The result is amazing: groups of the same symbols are found in different caves. It turns out that these marks are not just abstract scribbles, but some kind of code, something like a primitive writing.
It is too early to say that writing arose not in an agrarian society 6 thousand years ago, but among Cro-Magnons 30 thousand years ago. This is hardly a language in our modern understanding.
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But what can they mean? Researchers were struck by a set of five characters, which is especially common: "^ II III X II". It was found not only on the walls of caves, but also on a necklace made of deer teeth, which belonged to a young woman who lived in Saint-Germain-de-la-Riviere, north of Bordeaux (France) 15.5 thousand years ago. Three teeth are marked: "II ^", "III" and "X II".
By that time, deer were no longer found in France, so experts suggested that the necklace was brought from Spain. But then the next question arises: were the symbols carved on the necklace before or after the jewelry arrived in France? If before, then we can assume that different groups of Cro-Magnons understood each other's symbolism.
Whether the symbols carried a religious meaning or some other, in any case, this was important information.
Further - if this is indeed a written language, then when and where did it appear? 30 thousand years ago in Europe? Perhaps its beginnings existed long before the arrival of modern humans on the continent? Memory of the historical homeland - Africa?
Some anthropologists (for example, Richard Klein from Stanford University, Nicholas Conard from the University of Tübingen) believe that modern behavior arose in humans about 35 thousand years ago, because the emergence of complex symbolism, the sudden flowering of realistic art, the beginning of the production of advanced tools, and musical instruments, boats, etc. - everything happened at this time. Perhaps a role was played by the exchange of genes with Neanderthals, which initiated abrupt changes in the DNA of our ancestors, affecting the structure of the brain.
Others (including Alison Brooks of the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History and Peter Mitchell of the University of Oxford) argue that humans reached their full intellectual development long before they left Africa. Recent finds in South Africa include tiny flint points that may hint at the first arrows, and beautifully crafted ocher pieces that indicate the emergence of works of art and jewelry 70-90 thousand years ago. The hypothesis of the Cro-Magnon Cultural Revolution is what Mr. Mitchell calls Eurocentric stupidity.
Indeed, many crosses, circles, corners and other signs found in caves in France and Spain are also found in Africa, and refer to an earlier time. For example, an open corner can be seen in the South African Blombos Cave, where people lived about 75 thousand years ago. Perhaps they were carved not only on stone and bones, but also on wood and leather products that had rotted long ago.
In addition, the paint survived in the caves only due to the appropriate conditions, and how widely it was actually used is anyone's guess.