Upper Paleolithic Art 219Another suggestion is that initiation rites, such as
those marking the transition to adulthood, took place in
the painted galleries. In support of this idea, footprints,
most of which are small, have been found in the clay floors
of several caves, and in one they even circle a modeled clay
bison. The painted animals, so this argument goes, may
have had to do with knowledge being transmitted from
the elders to the youths. Furthermore, the transmission of
information might be implied by countless so-called signs,
apparently abstract designs that accompany much Upper
Paleolithic art. Some have interpreted these as tallies of
animals killed, a reckoning of time according to a lunar
calendar, or both.
These abstract designs, including such ones as the
spots on the Pech Merle horses, suggest yet another possi-
bility. For the most part, these are just like the entoptic de-
signs seen by subjects in experiments dealing with altered
states of consciousness and that are so consistently present
in the rock art of southern Africa. Furthermore, the rock
art of southern Africa shows the same painting of newTheories to account for the early European cave art
are problematic because they often depend on conjectural
and subjective interpretations. Some have argued that it is
art for art’s sake; but if that is so, why were animals often
painted over one another, and why were they placed in in-
accessible places? The latter might suggest that they were
for ceremonial purposes and that the caves served as reli-
gious sanctuaries.
One suggestion is that the animals were drawn to
ensure success in the hunt, another that their depic-
tion was seen as a way to promote fertility and increase
the size of the herds on which humans depended. In
Altamira Cave in northern Spain, for example, the art
shows a pervasive concern for the sexual reproduction
of the bison.^34 In cave art generally, though, the animals
painted show little relationship to those most frequently
hunted. Furthermore, there are few depictions of ani-
mals being hunted or killed, nor are there depictions of
animals copulating or with exaggerated sexual parts as
there are in the Venus figures.^35
were produced by spitting paint around
a hand held to the wall. But no one had
thought that entire animal images could
be created this way. Before he could test
his ideas, however, Lorblanchet had to
find a suitable rock face—the original
horses were painted on a roughly vertical
panel 13 feet across and 6 feet high.
With the help of a speleologist, he even-
tually found a rock face in a remote cave
high in the hills and set to work.
Following the aboriginal practices
he had witnessed, Lorblanchet first
made a light outline sketch of the
horses with a charred stick. Then he
prepared black pigment for the paint-
ing. “My intention had been to use
manganese dioxide, as the Pech Merle
painter did,” says Lorblanchet, refer-
ring to one of the minerals ground up
for paint by the early artists. “But I was
advised that manganese is somewhat
toxic, so I used wood charcoal in-
stead.” (Charcoal was used as pigment
by Paleolithic painters in other caves,
so Lorblanchet felt he could justify his
concession to safety.) To turn the char-
coal into paint, Lorblanchet ground it
with a limestone block, put the powder
in his mouth, and diluted it to the right
consistency with saliva and water. Forred pigment he used ochre from the lo-
cal iron-rich clay.
He started with the dark mane of the
right-hand horse. “I spat a series of dots
and fused them together to represent
tufts of hair,” he says, unselfconsciously
reproducing the spitting action as he
talks. “Then I painted the horse’s back by
blowing the pigment below my hand held
so”—he holds his hand flat against the
rock with his thumb tucked in to form a
straight line—“and used it like a stencil
to produce a sharp upper edge and a dif-
fused lower edge. You get an illusion of
the animal’s rounded flank this way.”
He experimented as he went. “You
see the angular rump?” he says, pointing
to the original painting. “I reproduced
that by holding my hand perpendicular
to the rock, with my palm slightly bent,
and I spat along the edge formed by my
hand and the rock.” He found he could
produce sharp lines, such as those in the
tail and in the upper hind leg, by spitting
into the gap between parallel hands.
The belly demanded more ingenuity;
he spat paint into a V-shape formed by
his two splayed hands, rubbed it into a
curved swath to shape the belly’s out-
line, then finger-painted short protrud-
ing lines to suggest the animals’ shaggyhair. Neatly outlined dots, he found,
could not be made by blowing a thin
jet of charcoal onto the wall. He had to
spit pigment through a hole made in an
animal skin. “I spent seven hours a day
for a week,” he says. “Puff... puff...
puff.... It was exhausting, particularly
because there was carbon monoxide in
the cave. But you experience something
special, painting like that. You feel
you are breathing the image onto the
rock—projecting your spirit from the
deepest part of your body onto the rock
surface.”
Was that what the Paleolithic painter
felt when creating this image? “Yes, I
know it doesn’t sound very scientific,”
Lorblanchet says of his highly personal
style of investigation, “but the intellec-
tual games of the structuralists haven’t
got us very far, have they? Studying rock
art shouldn’t be an intellectual game. It
is about understanding humanity. That’s
why I believe the experimental approach
is valid in this case.”Lewin, R. (1993). Paleolithic paint
job. Discover 14 (7), 67–69. Copyright
©1993 The Walt Disney Co. Reprinted
with permission of Discover Magazine.(^34) Halverson, J. (1989). Review of the book Altamira revisited and other
essays on early art. American Antiquity 54, 883.
(^35) Conard, N. J. (2009). A female figurine from the basal Aurignacian deposits
of Hohle Fels Cave in southwestern Germany. Nature 459 (7244), 248.