The Dawn of Human Culture (30 page)
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8
NATURE OR NURTURE
BEFORE THE DAWN?
One week before Christmas in 1994, three cave explorers made their way along one of the precipitous gorges cut into a limestone plateau in the Ardèche region of south-central France. Jean-Marie Chauvet, Éliette Brunel Deschamps, and Christian Hillaire had grown up in this dry, rocky region and had spent the past two decades probing its vast, underground mysteries. Sometimes they dug through dirt and rubble and squeezed into cracks only to find nothing. Other times their efforts were rewarded with the sight of luminous cave formations shaped by water, minerals, and the slow passage of time. On this evening, they would become the first people to gaze upon something even more fantastic: images created in the minds of people who lived more than 30,000 years ago.
Following an old mule path to a narrow cliff ledge at the entrance to a maze of gorges, the team noticed an opening in the cliff about 80 centimeters (30 inches) high and 30 centimeters (12 inches) 08 Nature or Nurture.r.qxd 1/29/02 5:06 PM Page 258
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wide. One at a time they slipped into the hole and emerged in a chamber where the rock ceiling was just above their heads. A slight breeze blew towards them, suggesting that a larger opening lay behind a pile of rubble blocking their way. The trio pulled away stones until they had enough room to move forward. Deschamps was in front, and about 3
meters (10 feet) in, the light from her headlamp revealed a drop of ten meters (33 feet) to the floor of a gallery below. The team shouted out and the resonating echoes told them that the cave’s innards offered far more to explore. First they needed to hike back to their van and obtain a flexible ladder. Night had fallen and weariness had set in, so the explorers nearly chose to head home and return a week later. But curiosity about what lay deeper inside the cliff overcame their fatigue.
Back in the cave, the team lowered the ladder and then themselves into a dark gallery smelling of wet clay, where sparkling calcite curtains and stalactites hung from the 15-meter (50-foot) high ceiling.
A much larger chamber loomed ahead, and at this point the explorers knew the cave was more extensive than any they had seen in the Ardèche gorges. They noticed cave bear bones and teeth scattered about, along with hibernation nests that the bears had scooped into the clay floor. Entering another narrower gallery, Deschamps cried out when her headlamp beam caught two short lines of red ocher on the wall. Then looking up the team spotted a mammoth drawn in red on a rocky spur hanging from the ceiling. More mammals soon materialized on the walls: bears, wild horses, lions, rhinoceroses, reindeer.
The cave was christened Chauvet Cave for Jean-Marie Chauvet, and continued exploration showed that it contained four gallery chambers over a length of about 500 meters (1650 feet). Together, the four chambers contained more than 260 painted and engraved animals, 08 Nature or Nurture.r.qxd 1/29/02 5:06 PM Page 259
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together with dots, geometric patterns, and stenciled hand prints. In most previously known decorated caves, like Lascaux, Les Trois-Frères, and Niaux in southwestern France and Altamira in northern Spain (Figure 8.1), the artists mainly depicted horses, bison, wild cattle, deer, or wild goats (ibex). They rarely portrayed mammoths, rhinoceroses, lions, and bears. Yet the Chauvet artists focused on these species, and they used subtle shading and perspective to portray their subjects in naturalistic poses. France’s Inspector General of Decorated Caves, BRITAIN
GERMANY
0
200
BELGIUM
0
200 miles
Hohlenstein-Stadel
Atlantic Ocean
Geissenklösterle
Vogelherd
FRANCE
SWITZERLAND
Rouffignac
Jovelle
Lascaux
Vacheresse, Ebbou,
Gabillo
Las
Cougnac
Le Colombier, Oulen,
Chimeneas
La Mouthe
Peche Merle
Les Deux-Ouvertures,
La Covaciella
( El Castillo)
Tête-du-Lion, Le Figuier
Les Trois-Frères
& Chabot
Micolón
Le Portel
Garga
ITALY
Bayol
Altamira
Fontanet
Santimamiñe
La Baume-Latrone
Réseau
Clastre
Niaux
Cosquer
SPAIN
Chauvet
TUGAL
POR
Parpalló
Mediterranean Sea
FIGURE 8.1
The main Upper Paleolithic art sites of Western Europe.
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archeologist Jean Clottes, who leads the team now studying Chauvet, believes that a single artist, a prehistoric Leonardo, produced most of the charcoal images. The rhinoceroses, of which there are more than forty, often share exaggerated horns and distinctively curled ears as if they were painted by the same skilled hand. The cave’s largest single frieze shows a dozen rhinoceroses presented from various angles but in the same singular style.
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showed that the paintings had been created between 32,000 and 31,000
years ago. The artists then must have been early Upper Paleolithic Aurignacian people, whose ancestors had replaced the Neanderthals (Mousterians) in France only a few thousand years before. The Chauvet paintings precede the next-oldest radiocarbon-dated examples by 5000
to 10,000 years, and they are at least 15,000 years older than the famous (Magdalenian) paintings of Lascaux, Niaux, and Altamira. Still, they are not the only examples of spectacular art from the dawn of human culture in Europe. Early Aurignacian layers in the caves at Vogelherd (Stetten), Geissenklösterle, and Hohlenstein-Stadel in southwestern Germany (Figure 8.1) have provided seventeen spectacular ivory figurines that are as old or older. They tend to feature the same
“dangerous” animal species that were painted and engraved at Chauvet, and one 30-centimeter (12-inch) tall statuette from 08 Nature or Nurture.r.qxd 1/29/02 5:06 PM Page 261
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Hohlenstein-Stadel depicts a fantastic figure with a lion’s head planted unmistakably on a human body (Figure 8.2). At Galgenberg Hill, near Krems, Austria, an Aurignacian artist working 32,000 years ago transformed a small slab of green serpentine rock into a remarkable 7-centimeter (2.75-inch) tall figure of a woman, left hand in the air, bent right arm and hand on the hip, and left breast protruding in profile (Figure 8.3). Finally, some early Aurignacian sites contain numerous personal ornaments, especially ivory beads, each carefully shaped by a meticulous, time-consuming process that we describe below.
The preceding Mousterian has provided nothing to compare to the Aurignacian paintings, engravings, figurines, and beads. Together with an increase in stone-tool diversity and standardization and the first routine manufacture of standardized (formal) artifacts in bone, ivory, and antler, the art and ornaments underscore the great gulf that separated even the earliest Upper Paleolithic people from the preceding Mousterians. The contrast becomes even starker when we consider the remarkable monotony of the Mousterian over thousands or even tens of thousands of years and compare this to the rapid diversification in both utilitarian and non-utilitarian artifact types that occurred from the Aurignacian onwards. In the rate at which material culture changed and diversified, only the Upper Paleolithic recalls later prehistory and recorded history. Like the yet earlier cultural traditions, in its conservatism the Mousterian suggests a system for which we have no historic analog.
We are not the first to emphasize the contrast between the Upper Paleolithic and everything that preceded it, and where we speak of the
“dawn of human culture,” others refer to a “human revolution,” a “creative explosion,” “a great leap forward,” or a “sociocultural big bang.”
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0
0
FIGURE 8.2
Mammoth ivory “lion-
human” statuette from
an Aurignacian layer at
Hohlenstein-Stadel,
southwestern Germany
(redrawn from an origi-
5 cm
2 in
nal by J. Hahn in J.
Hohlenstein-Stadel
Clottes 1996,
Antiquity
70, p. 280).
Most authorities highlight European findings, but we have stressed even older evidence for the “dawn” in Africa. The African data are less abundant and spectacular, at least in part because the vagaries of preservation have left fewer relevant African sites and there have been fewer archeologists to seek them out. Related to this, archeologists have been 08 Nature or Nurture.r.qxd 1/29/02 5:06 PM Page 263
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0
0
FIGURE 8.3
Female figurine in ser-
5 cm
pentine from an
Aurignacian layer at
2 in
Galgenberg Hill, Austria
(drawn and copyrighted
by Kathryn Cruz-Uribe
Galgenberg
from a photograph).
accumulating relevant evidence in Europe since the 1860s, while the key African observations all postdate 1965. Yet, the “dawn” is just as real in Africa, and, equally important, it occurred there first. Spectacular as it is, the European Upper Paleolithic, beginning around 40,000 years ago, was simply an outgrowth of behavioral change that occurred in Africa 08 Nature or Nurture.r.qxd 1/29/02 5:06 PM Page 264
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perhaps 5000 years earlier. That said, we must now proceed to the most difficult question of all: what accounts for the “dawn.” The answer as we shall see is contentious, and it may always be that way.
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Archeologist Randall White of New York University specializes in the study of Upper Paleolithic portable art (the kind found in the ground). He believes that ivory beads, perforated shells, pierced animal teeth, and other ornaments or portable art objects are as symbolic as the charcoal rhinoceroses that early Upper Paleolithic Aurignacian artists drew on the walls of Chauvet Cave or the multicolored bison that later Upper Paleolithic Magdalenians painted on the ceiling of Altamira Cave. Upper Paleolithic people often portrayed animals that they hunted and ate, judging by the food debris in their sites, but they also commonly showed species that they rarely obtained and that were probably rare on the landscape. The choice of what to show was thus arbitrary, and it was probably often rooted in local beliefs about how nature was organized or about the relationship between nature and society. White notes that Upper Paleolithic people were equally arbitrary in producing ornaments or portable art objects, and the choice 08 Nature or Nurture.r.qxd 1/29/02 5:06 PM Page 265
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varied widely through time and space. In the early Aurignacian interval before 30,000 years ago, for example, people produced ivory beads and animal-tooth pendants mainly in France and Russia, they perforated shells for hanging mostly in Spain, France, and Italy, they crafted three-dimensional animal sculptures mainly in Central Europe, and they engraved limestone blocks only in a small area of southwestern France. Since none of the objects were utilitarian, the choice of what to produce was probably rooted in locally varying beliefs about the natural or social order.
White’s research shows that the production of early
Aurignacian beads required extraordinary time and effort, which underscores the likelihood that they had symbolic meaning. The manufacturing process involved multiple steps: the fashioning of a pencil-like rod in ivory or soft stone; the incision of grooves 1 to 2
centimeters (0.4 to 0.8 inches) apart around the rod; the application of pressure to snap off cylindrical bead blanks or preforms between the grooves; the creation of a hole for hanging, either by gouging each blank inwards from the ends or by rotational drilling; and finally the use of a naturally occurring abrasive to smooth and grind each bead into a standardized shape.
White’s experiments show that a single bead usually required one to three person-hours, yet some Upper Paleolithic sites contain scores, hundreds, or even thousands. The most spectacular example is from Sungir’, Russia, an open-air site that was occupied about 29,000
