Scientist of the Day - Chauvet Cave

Horses’ heads, detail of Sector of Horses, Chauvet Cave, Ardeche, France (donsmaps.com)

Chauvet Cave, in the Ardeche Gorge of southeastern France, one of the world’s most stunning sites for paleolithic art, was discovered only recently, on Dec. 18, 1994, by three cavers, Jean-Marie Chauvet, Eliette Brunel-Deschamps, and Christian Hillaire. I don’t know very much about the three speleologists, and they were not scientists anyway, so we honor today the prehistoric artists who painted these works of art, as they were the first animaliers whose artistic legacy has come down to us.

Sector of Horses, entire wall, Chauvet Cave, Ardeche, France (donsmaps.com)

The animals depicted include cave bears, hyenas, lions, woolly rhinos, some 13 different species in all, captured in over 400 different poses, a few of which we see in the sections and details reproduced here. As you can see instantly, these are exquisite paintings, full of life, making clever use of the uneven rock surface beneath. They include animals not included in the previously known Paleolithic sites, such as those at Lascaux and Altamira, where the beasts drawn are mostly passive herbivores, such as reindeer, aurochs, and the occasional horse. Here we have carnivores, and feisty ones at that, such as the two wooly rhinos that are fighting or mating or both. Indeed, there are bowl-shaped depressions in the cave floor that paleozoologists think are where cave bears slept.  Nothing like having your animal sitters close at hand when you need them.

Fighting rhinos, Chauvet Cave, Ardeche, France (donsmaps.com)

The dates assigned to the Chauvet cave paintings are in perpetual revision, as more and more charcoal samples are gathered for carbon dating, but the current consensus is that the oldest paintings at Chauvet date to about 36,000 years ago, and continued for a few thousand years, until the original cave entrance was sealed up by a landslide about 29,000 years ago, and the cave remained sealed until an alternate entrance was forged in 1994.  The Chauvet cave paintings are the oldest known, or at least the oldest dated, and are assigned to the Aurignacian stage of the Upper Paleolithic.

Three bears, Chauvet Cave, Ardeche, France (donsmaps.com)

All of the images we show here of Chauvet Cave were taken from the wonderful website, Don’s Maps, administered by Don Hitchcock. He has one enormous webpage on Chauvet Cave, with hundreds of photos, maps, and diagrams, and since he is scrupulous about giving sources and copyright info, I can credit Don for the photos here and you can find the full credits on his webpage.  I wrote a little about Don in my post on Karel Absolon and the Venus of Dolní Věstonice.

Panel of the Big Lions, Chauvet Cave, Ardeche, France (donsmaps.com)

Chauvet Cave was closed to the public almost immediately after its discovery, as lessons had been learned from the fungal destruction wrought at Altamira and Lascaux by human exhalations.  But in 2009, Werner Herzog, the great film director who gave us Fitzcarraldo in 1982, was given permission to film in the cave using 3-D cameras, with however certain severe restrictions – minimal lighting, minimal crew, and only 6 shooting days of a few hours each (seventh image). What he accomplished under these conditions is quite astonishing, as you can see in the resulting film, Cave of Forgotten Dreams, premiered in 2010. The film is essentially a walk through the cave in near darkness, with shadows moving across walls and fierce animals leaping momentarily into the light and then vanishing. I saw the film in 3-D, and it was one of the few such films I have seen where the 3-D really added to the experience. Viewing in 3-D is probably no longer possible, but the film is still available on 2-D DVD, and possibly on some streaming services.  It is well worth seeing, even in 2-D. You can see the original trailer here.

Negative handprint, perhaps by one of the artists, Chauvet Cave, Ardeche, France (donsmaps.com)

Chauvet Cave is now a World Heritage Site, acquiring that status in 2014.  It is one of the few World Heritage sites that no one is allowed to see.  They have built a full-size replica of the cave (or parts of it) for tourists, as they did at Altamira and Lascaux, and it is supposed to be an excellent facsimile of the real thing, but a copy of a cave (or painting) has never much appealed to me as a substitute for the real thing. I like replicas in their proper place, such as on my desk or wall, but not in the field.  That is evidently a minority opinion, or they wouldn’t go to such trouble and expense to make these full-size replicas.

Crew of Cave of Forgotten Dreams on their way to the cave, with Werner Herzog second from right, Chauvet Cave, Ardeche, France (donsmaps.com)

I own a book by the three cave discoverers, Dawn of Art: The Chauvet Cave, the Oldest Known Paintings in the World, by Jean-Marie Chauvet, Eliette Brunel-Deschamps, and Christian Hillaire (Harry N. Abrams, 1996).  As I cannot find it at the moment, I am unable to answer the question that no doubt occurred to you: why was the cave named after Chauvet, and not  Brunel-Deschamps, or Hillaire?

William B. Ashworth, Jr., Consultant for the History of Science, Linda Hall Library and Associate Professor emeritus, Department of History, University of Missouri-Kansas City. Comments or corrections are welcome; please direct to ashworthw@umkc.edu.