Leonardo’s Mountain of Clams and the Diet of Worms (21 page)

III

HUM
A
N PR
E
HISTORY

UP AGAINST A WALL

W
E ARE
,
ABOVE ALL
,
A CONTENTIOUS LOT
,
UNABLE TO AGREE ON MUCH OF
anything. Alexander Pope caught the essence of our discord in a couplet (though modern technology has vitiated the force of his simile):

Most proclamations of unanimity therefore convey a fishy odor—arising either from
imposed restraint (“elections” in dictatorial one-party states), or comedic invention to underscore an opposite reality (as when Ko-Ko, in Gilbert and Sullivan’s
Mikado
, reads a document signed by the Attorney-General, the Lord Chief Justice, the Master of the Rolls, the Judge Ordinary, and the Lord Chancellor—and then proclaims, “Never knew such unanimity on a point of law in my life.” But the
document has been endorsed by only one signatory—for Pooh-Bah holds all the aforementioned titles!).

Paleontologists probably match the average among human groups for levels of contentiousness among individuals (while students of human prehistory surely rank near the top, for this field contains more practitioners than objects for study, thus breeding a high level of acquisitiveness and territoriality).
Yet one subject—and only one—elicits absolute unanimity of judgment among students of ancient life, though for reasons more visceral than intellectual. Every last mother’s son and daughter among us stands in reverent awe and amazement before the great cave paintings done by our ancestors in southern and central Europe between roughly thirty thousand and ten thousand years ago.

If this wonderment
stands as our only point of consensus (not confined, by the way, to scientific professionals, but shared with any member
of Homo sapiens
possessing the merest modicum of curiosity about our past), please don’t regard me as a Scrooge or a Grinch if I point out that our usual rationale for such awe arises from a pairing of reasons—one entirely appropriate, and the other completely invalid. For I
don’t impart this news to suggest any diminution of wonder, but rather to clear away some conceptual baggage that, once discarded, might free us to appreciate even more fully this amazing beginning of our most worthy institution.

For the good reason, we look at the best and most powerful examples of this art, and we just know that we have fixed a Michelangelo in our gaze. Comparisons of this
sort seem so obvious, and so just, that they have become a virtual cliche for anyone’s description of a first reaction to a wonderfully painted cave wall. For example, in describing his emotional reaction to the newly discovered cave of Chauvet—the source of eventual dénouement for this essay as well—a noted expert wrote: “Looking closely at the splendid heads of the four horses, I was suddenly overcome
with emotion. I felt a deep and clear certainty that here was the work of one of the great masters, a Leonardo da Vinci of the Solutrean revealed to us for the first time. It was both humbling and exhilarating.”

For the bad argument, our amazement also arises for a conceptual reason added to our simple (and entirely appropriate) visceral awe. We are, in short, surprised, even stunned, to discover
that something so old could be so sophisticated. Old should mean rudimentary—either primitive by greater evolutionary regress toward an apish past, or infantile by closer approach to the first steps on our path toward modernity. (These metaphors of grunting coarseness or babbling juvenility probably hold about equal sway in the formation of our prejudices.) As we travel in time down our own evolutionary
tree, we should encounter ever-older ancestors of ever-decreasing mental capacity. The first known expressions of representational art should therefore be crude and primitive. Instead, we see the work of a primal Picasso—and we are dumbstruck.

I dedicate this essay to tracing the prevalence of this view in the lifework of the two greatest scholars of Paleolithic cave art. I shall then argue that
this equation of older with more rudimentary both violates the expectations of evolutionary theory when properly construed, and has now also been empirically disproven by discoveries at Chauvet and elsewhere. I shall then suggest that the more appropriate expectation of maximal sophistication for this earliest art should only increase our appreciation—for we trade a false (if heroic) view of ever-expanding
triumph for a deeply satisfying feeling of oneness with people who were, biologically, fully us in circumstances of maximal distance, both temporal and cultural, from our current lives.

(No species of punditry deserves more ridicule than the art form known as Monday-morning quarterbacking or backseat driving—the “I told you so” of the nonparticipant. This essay veers dangerously toward such an
unworthy activity. I am, after all, a paleontologist and expert on land snails, not an art historian or a student of human culture. What right do I have to criticize the monumental and lifelong efforts of the Abbé Henri Breuil and André Leroi-Gourhan, the most learned and prolific of true devotees? In defense, I would say, first, that honorable errors do not count as failures in science, but as
seeds for progress in the quintessential activity of correction. No great and new study has ever developed without substantial error, and we need only cite a famous line from Darwin: “False facts are highly injurious to the progress of science, for they often endure long; but false views, if supported by some evidence, do little harm, for every one takes a salutary pleasure in proving their falseness.”
In reverse of Marc Antony, I have come to praise Breuil and Leroi-Gourhan, not to bury them. Second, the perspective of cognate fields can often bring light to neighboring disciplines too set in favored ways. I therefore speak from my close vicinity of evolutionary theory to point out—as many have before me, and on the same basis—that conventional expectations have no sanction in our current
understanding of evolution, and therefore represent lingering prejudices that we might wish to reassess and then choose to discard.)

The general title of “ice-age” or “Paleolithic” (literally, Old Stone Age) art has been applied to the great variety and geographic spread of works in two major categories—smaller and movable objects usually called “portable” (the so-called Venus figurines, the
deer, horses, and other animals carved in bone or ivory on disks, plaques, and spear-throwers, for example); and the engravings and paintings on cave walls (and now from a few open sites as well), dubbed “parietal.” (A
paries
is a Latin wall; if you belong to my generation, you will remember, now with amusement but then with utmost frustration, the parietal hours of college dorms, when members
of the opposite sex had to return within the walls of their own rooms, and not remain in yours.) European portable art extends from Spain to Siberia; parietal art has been found mostly in France and northern Spain, with a few Italian sites, and perhaps others even more distant. (Decorated caves in other genres, but perhaps of equal or even greater age, have been found in many other areas of the world,
from Africa to Australia.)

Current radiocarbon dates (from charcoal) of paintings in parietal art span a range from 32,410 years
B.P.
(before the present) at Chauvet, to 11,600 years
B.P.
at Le Portel. This period corresponds to the occupation of Europe by our own species,
Homo sapiens
(often called “Cro-Magnon” in this incarnation to honor a French site of first discovery. Remember that the
Cro-Magnon people are us—by both bodily anatomy and parietal art—not some stooped and grunting distant ancestor). The immediately earlier inhabitants of Europe, the famous Neanderthal people, did not (so far as we know) produce any representational art. Neanderthals overlapped Cro-Magnon in Europe, probably into the time of Cro-Magnon’s early parietal art. This striking cultural difference reinforces
the opinion that Neanderthal and Cro-Magnon were two separate, albeit closely related, species, and not end-points of a smooth evolutionary continuum. On this view, Neanderthal died out, while Cro-Magnon continues as us (see chapter 10).

Two subjects have long dominated the theoretical discussion on parietal art: function and chronology. The two greatest scholars in this field—the Abbé Henri
Breuil and André Leroi-Gourhan—differed profoundly in their views about function, but (somewhat paradoxically) agreed substantially in their proposals about chronology.

Of the several French priests who have become distinguished students of ancient life (in a land where both Catholic traditions and general intellectual commitments favor harmony between the different domains of science and religion—see
chapter 14), Pierre Teilhard de Chard in surely won the most fame, while the Abbé Henri Breuil may well have done the best work. Breuil, a talented artist, spent nearly sixty years copying figures from cave walls (at a time when photography yielded poor images in such subterranean conditions), and then comparing the results in his compendia of drawings. He traced directly from cave walls
whenever possible, and with utmost care at all times (drawings are not inherently more subjective than photographs). But he sometimes had to work by difficult and indirect methods. He could not, for example, press paper against the famous painted ceiling of Altamira because any direct contact detached the pasty pigment used by Paleolithic artists. Therefore, positioned like Michelangelo under the
Sistine Chapel ceiling, he lay on his back, cushioned on soft sacks of ferns, while holding his paper as close to the roof as possible, and making imperfect sketches.

As he drew the animals one by one, Breuil tended to read their meaning in the same piecemeal fashion—that is, as individuals rather than parts of integrated compositions. He held that the paintings functioned as a kind of “hunting
magic” to make game plentiful (if you draw it, it will come), or to ensure success in the kill (game animals are often painted with wounds and spear holes). Breuil wrote in his summary book of 1952:

In the next generation, André Leroi-Gourhan, director of the Musée de l’Homme in Paris, approached the same subject of meaning from the maximally different perspective of his “card-carrying” membership in one of the major intellectual movements of our century—French structuralism as embodied in the work of anthropologist Claude
Lévi-Strauss. This form of structuralism searches for timeless and integrative themes based on dichotomous divisions that may record much of nature’s reality, but mostly reflect the brain’s basic mode of operation. Thus, we separate nature from culture (the raw and the cooked, in Levi-Strauss’s terminology), light from darkness, and, above all, male from female.

Leroi-Gourhan therefore viewed
each cave as an integrated composition, a sanctuary in which the numbers and positions of animals bore unified meaning within a scheme set by the primary duality of male and female. Each animal became a symbol, with a primary division between horses as male and bisons as female. He also interpreted abstract signs and artifacts as sexually labeled, with spears (for example) as male, and wounds as
female. He viewed the cave itself as fundamentally female, thus requiring a definite positioning and grouping of male symbols. Led by this theory, Leroi-Gourhan treated each cave as a unity and compiled extensive statistical tables of numbers and locations—in maximal contrast with Breuil’s concentration on each animal in and for itself. Leroi-Gourhan wrote:

And yet, despite their maximal ideological difference on the function and meaning of cave art, Breuil and Leroi-Gourhan maintained agreement on the second great subject
of chronology. To be sure (and as we shall see), these two great scholars diverged on many particulars, but they shared an unswerving and defining conviction—a kind of central and unshakable faith—that the chronology of cave art must record a progression from crude and simple beginnings to ever more refined and sophisticated expression. In so doing, these scholars could assimilate the earliest known
history of representational art to the classic myths and sagas of Western culture—the hero’s birth, his first faltering steps, his rise to maturity, his triumph and dominion, and, ultimately, his tragic fall (for both Breuil and Leroi-Gourhan included a final stage of degeneration after the ice retreated and the game dispersed).

In regarding a progressive chronology as a consummation so devoutly
to be wished, Breuil and Leroi-Gourhan had complex motives. They were, no doubt and in large part, simply caught up in conventional modes of thinking, so deep and so automatic in our culture that such views rarely bubble to a conscious surface where they might be questioned. But an important technical reason also drove both scholars to such a hope. Layers of sediment can often be dated by various
means, now conventional. But a cave is a hole in the ground; how can you specify the age of a cavity? (You might ascertain the age of rocks forming the cave wall, but these dates bear no relationship at all to the age of the cave as a hole.) How, then, can you know the time of a prehistoric painting or engraving on a cave wall? (Today we can date the pigments by carbon-14 and other methods, particularly
the charcoal used to draw black lines, but Breuil had no access to such techniques at all, and the carbon-14 methods of Leroi-Gourhan’s time required so much material to obtain a date that entire paintings would have been sacrificed—a procedure that no one, quite properly, would ever sanction.)