Evolution And History

218 CHAPTER 9 | The Global Expansion of Homo sapiens and Their Technology

animal fat was burned. Experimentation has shown that

such lamps would have provided adequate illumination

over several hours.

The techniques used by Upper Paleolithic peoples to

create their cave paintings were unraveled a decade ago

through the experimental work of Michel Lorblanchet.

Interestingly, they turn out to be the same ones used by

Aboriginal rock painters in Australia. Lorblanchet’s ex-

periments are described in the following Original Study

by science writer Roger Lewin.

scenes or depictions of events at all common. Instead,
the animals are often abstracted from nature and ren-
dered two-dimensionally—no small achievement for
these early artists. Sometimes the artists made use of
bulges and other features of the rock to impart a more
three-dimensional feeling. Frequently, the paintings are
in hard-to-get-at places while suitable surfaces in more
accessible places remain untouched. In some caves, the
lamps by which the artists worked have been found;
these are spoon-shaped objects of sandstone in which

Original Study

Paleolithic Paint Job by Roger Lewin

Lorblanchet’s recent bid to re-create one

of the most important Ice Age images

in Europe was an affair of the

heart as much as the head. “I

tried to abandon my skin of a

modern citizen, tried to experi-

ence the feeling of the artist,

to enter the dialogue between

the rock and the man,” he ex-

plains. Every day for a week in

the fall of 1990 he drove the

20 miles from his home in the

medieval village of Cajarc into

the hills above the river Lot.

There, in a small, practically

inaccessible cave, he trans-

formed himself into an Upper

Paleolithic painter.

And not just any Upper

Paleolithic painter, but the one

who 18,400 years ago crafted

the dotted horses inside the fa-

mous cave of Pech Merle.

You can still see the original

horses in Pech Merle’s vast

underground geologic splendor.

You enter through a narrow passageway

and soon find yourself gazing across

a grand cavern to where the painting

seems to hang in the gloom. “Outside,

the landscape is very different from the

one the Upper Paleolithic people saw,”

says Lorblanchet. “But in here, the land-

scape is the same as it was more than

18,000 years ago. You see what the Up-

per Paleolithic people experienced.” No

matter where you look in this cavern, the

eye is drawn back to the panel of horses.

The two horses face away from each

other, rumps slightly overlapping, their

outlines sketched in black. The animal

on the right seems to come alive as it

merges with a crook in the edge of the

panel, the perfect natural shape for

a horse’s head. But the impression of

naturalism quickly fades as the eye falls

on the painting’s dark dots. There are

more than 200 of them, deliberately

distributed within and below the bodies

and arcing around the right-hand horse’s

head and mane. More cryptic still are a

smattering of red dots and half-circles

and the floating outline of a fish. The

surrealism is completed by six disem-

bodied human hands stenciled above

and below the animals.

Lorblanchet began thinking about re-

creating the horses after a research trip

to Australia over a decade ago. Not only

is Australia a treasure trove of rock art,

but its aboriginal people are still creat-

ing it. “In Queensland I learned how

people painted by spitting pigment onto

the rock,” he recalls. “They spat paint

and used their hand, a piece of cloth,

or a feather as a screen to create differ-

ent lines and other effects. Elsewhere

in Australia people used chewed twigs

as paintbrushes, but in Queensland the

spitting technique worked best.” The

rock surfaces there were too

uneven for extensive brush-

work, he adds—just as they

are in Quercy.

When Lorblanchet re-

turned home he looked at

the Quercy paintings with a

new eye. Sure enough, he

began seeing the telltale

signs of spit-painting—lines

with edges that were sharply

demarcated on one side

and fuzzy on the other, as if

they had been airbrushed—

instead of the brushstrokes

he and others had assumed

were there. Could you pro-

duce lines that were crisp

on both edges with the same

technique, he wondered, and

perhaps dots too? Archeolo-

gists had long recognized

that hand stencils, which are

common in prehistoric art,

© Jean Vertut

This spotted horse in the French cave of Pech Merle was

painted by an Upper Paleolithic artist.

FRANCE

SPAIN

ENGLAND

BELGIUM

GERMANY

SWITZ.

ITALY

Atlantic

Ocean

Mediterranean

Sea

LUX.

Quercy

Region