without doubt, and the Paleolithic cave paintings at Chauvet-Pont-d’Arc
in the Ardèche valley of southern France illustrate this vividly. These
images, which were made in charcoal and ocher more than thirty
thousand years ago, are twice as old as their more famous counterparts at
Lascaux. They are noteworthy, not just for their startling accuracy but for
their emphasis on big cats: Chauvet contains seventy-three confirmed
images of lions, more than all the other known European caves combined.
Cave lions were bigger than any living cat and yet what is clear from
these works is that the artists who rendered them spent a lot of time
observing these creatures in an uninhibited state, apparently from very
close range. The attention to detail—down to the patterning of whisker
spots and the depiction of subtle but specific leonine behaviors—
translates to the present day. And yet, alongside these strictly literal
representations one can see a lion with hooves instead of paws, and a
possibly shamanic proto-Minotaur, or werebison. Seen together, these
lavishly illuminated walls resemble the pages of a protean narrative form
in which Beowulf, The Book of Kells, and National Geographic were
elided into a cascading, fire-powered zootrope. While it is only natural to
be impressed by such modern-seeming feats of artistic skill and
interpretive nuance, one could argue that it is also condescending. After
all, these artist/hunter/storyteller/shamans were Homo sapiens, too: our
direct ancestors, equipped with the same brains and the same bodies.
Only the knowledge base and circumstances differed.
These so-called cavemen, who lived much as the so-called Bushmen
did in the 1950s, also shared the same motives and opportunities for
observation and, no doubt, many of the same emotions (some Bushman
groups made wall art as well). Thirty millennia is not that long on the
Paleolithic scale of time, and there is no reason to suppose—other things
being equal—that our relations with big cats would have changed much.
Based on the accumulated evidence, it is not a stretch to suggest that the
Chauvet cave artists, the Kalahari Bushmen, and the indigenous peoples
of Primorye all perceived their enormous feline neighbors in similar
ways: as fearsome, fascinating, supernaturally potent beings who charged
their lives with meaning, and sometimes provided meat. Predation
ron
(Ron)
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