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I recently had the satisfying experience of finding out that something I "knew" intuitively was actually true. Anyone who has seen a reproduction of the prehistoric cave paintings from Europe is likely to be impressed, especially when their age of those paintings is revealed. Some are as old as 35,000 years, but most are 25,000 — 15,000 years and they are staggeringly, hauntingly, beautiful. And I have believed for years that they are also largely realistic, not symbolic, in content.
Horses are often depicted in these paintings or engravings; one estimate is that horses represent 30% of the identifiable animals in such artwork. Among the most iconic images from France are the "Chinese horses" from Lascaux, which look like a charming chubby breed like Fjord horses, and the famous "spotted horses" from the cave of Pêch-Merle. The panel of Pêch-Merle horses is about 12' (4 m) long and 4' (1.5 m) high and is radiocarbon dated to 25,000 years ago.
This photo shows the famous spotted horse panel from Pêch-Merle. Were the ancient horses really spotted?
To me, the most compelling part of seeing these paintings was that I understood for the first time how literal — how realistic — they were. Mammoths were depicted most commonly as a signature silhouette — the line of the trunk, tusk, forehead and humped back — with a woolly coat but no feet. Why? My thought was that if you saw that shape, you stayed well away; you did not want to get close enough to observe the feet.
My feeling was that images of spotted horses were depictions of... spotted horses. I could see two obvious possibilities. One was that these images showed horses with strongly dappled coats. The other was that the horses being painted actually had spots, like those seen on breeds like Appaloosas, Knabstruppers, and Noriker horses today. The Appaloosa shown below also has a dark neck and shoulder area and dark mane and tail, like the Pêch-Merle images.
This beautiful Appaloosa shows a coat pattern very similar to that seen in the painting at Pêch-Merle. Photo by Jerry Keenan.
Now a team of geneticists led by Melanje Fruvost of the Leibnitz Institute for Zoo and Wildlife research in Germany has shown just that. They sequenced genomes from the bones of 31 prehistoric horses in Eurasia dated to well before domestication occurred. The team identified seven genomes that had the familiar color genes for a black coat, eighteen for bay coat (a reddish-brown with black feet & mane), and six for the leopard complex that gives some modern horses their distinctive dark-spots-on-white pattern.
You might think that a black and white spotted horse would be very visible to predators, but think again: the black and white striped zebra is wonderfully camouflaged in the right environment. Fruvost's team suggests that the leopard complex pattern might be an excellent choice for a horses living in Ice Age Europe, in a landscape dotted with snow.
However that's not the whole story. A few years ago, a group of veterinarians at the University of Sasketchewan, led by Lynne Sandesman, showed a convincing link between form of congenital stationary night blindness (CSNB) and Appaloosa horses carrying two alleles for the leopard complex rather than only one, which is also sufficient to produce spotting. In genetic jargon, these horses were homozygous for the leopard complex genes. Obviously night blindness could have been a highly deleterious trait in a prehistoric horse that roamed a region full of wolves, cave bears, cave lions, and cave hyenas, to name a few predators. We also know that human ancestors frequently killed horses.
In that case, why didn't all the spotted horses carrying even one allele for this gene die out? We can't be sure, but we know they didn't because the same leopard complex gene is found in modern horses that Fruvost's team found in the ancient horses.
Possibly the spotted coats of ancient horses with the single allele for the leopard complex - who were heterozygous — were so much better camouflaged than unspotted horses that the leopard complex gene persisted stayed in the wild population even though individuals with both genes were more likely to die prematurely.
I am not surprised to find out that the prehistoric cave painters depicted what they saw with great accuracy, especially in terms of key features like coat colors and typical postures. This doesn't mean the cave paintings had no symbolic meanings. Their tremendous emotional and symbolic content can still be felt today, tens of thousands of years later. But they were created by people who knew the animals they painted intimately and knew how important that knowledge was.
To try to share the experience of seeing these prehistoric cave paintings nd realizing their immense value, I'm going to close this post with an extended quotation from my book, THE ANIMAL CONNECTION, in which I describe the vivid experience of going to visit Lascaux, perhaps the iconic painted cave in France.
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It was a sunny, hot summer's day in the south of France. My husband and I were traveling with two Italian friends, visiting sites where important fossils or prehistoric art had been found, and this was the end of our trip. I remember eating well, staying in lovely little hotels, and laughing a great deal. We had seen beautiful prehistoric paintings and sculptures.
Nothing warned me that the last day of our holiday would have a tremendous emotional impact on me.
Since 1963, the cave of Lascaux has been closed to the general public because the heavy tourist traffic was damaging the famous paintings. Since then, scientists or artists have been able to apply well in advance (six months or more) for permission to enter the cave. At that time, up to five individuals, plus a guide, could enter for 35 minutes, five days a week. Now a single scientist is allowed in only one day a month, because humans aggravate the fungus that is slowly destroying the remarkable artwork in Lascaux. We were fortunate to have been granted such a permit and joined a disabled poet for our tour.
The paved sidewalk leading to the cave has broad, shallow steps that slope downward from a large grassy area to a large set of bronze doors, which looked like it belonged on a Hollywood set as the entrance to an Egyptian pharoah's tomb. Our guide unlocked and opened the massive doors, ushering us from the bright sunlight and warmth into a cool, dimly lit antechamber. Each of us stepped carefully into a shallow trough of formaldehyde intended to kill any algae or pollen that might be clinging to our shoes. The door to the outside was carefully closed before the door to the next stage was opened. The feeling was a little like entering the airlock of an aviary or a butterfly enclosure, taking precautions so that nothing from the outsides flies in, or vice versa..
We left the antechamber, carefully closing the door behind us, and walked carefully down a narrow, sloping ramp -- not the original cave floor -- lit by low, dim bulbs to prevent stumbling. We held onto a cold, damp, iron railing on our right, which helped the poet navigate the terrain. She was determined to see the artworks she had read so much about, as were we all, but her difficulty in walking made her efforts more apparent. The cave itself was colder still than the anteroom: 52 degrees as caves always are. The space felt intimate, small but not claustrophobic.
After about 25 yards, our guide stopped us. We stood a moment in total darkness. With a magician's flair, the guide suddenly turned up the lights and we were surrounded by huge, vivid creatures out of the prehistoric past. All of us gasped. We were in the Great Hall of the Bulls.
No images I had ever seen, no study of the brilliant reproductions in so many books, had prepared me for what I saw. The animals were enormous -- some nine feet long -- and beautiful. There were no petty artistic conventions: no frames shaping neat rectangular spaces, no careful placing of images at eye height, no ground lines, no landscapes, no nothing -- only vibrant bulls, stags, and horses that swirled and ran and covered the ceiling, the walls, the bumps, the flat places, and leapt out of the darkness at us. I thought for a moment I was going to fall over backwards. The paintings were incredibly bold and enveloping.
I barely listened as the guide used a strong flashlight to identify and point out various features and animals. Analysis, interpretation, words were completely unimportant. There was only the darkness, the light, and the vast, compelling animals.
We moved slowly from chamber to chamber, looking and looking and saying little. The Great Hall of the Bulls merged into the Painted Gallery. A magnificent stag with palmate antlers stood at the front and then we followed a series of horses and cattle down the cave. There was one peculiar beast -- known as the Unicorn though it clearly has two horns -- that has never been completely identified. It may be a mountain antelope of some kind. The horses were the irresistible Lascaux "Chinese horses," so named because their stout bodies, erect manes, and dainty feet reminded some long-ago prehistorian of ancient Chinese statues. To me -- a horsewoman -- they looked like ponies or some chunky breed of small horse, like Icelandic horses or perhaps Haflingers, running one after another down the gallery. The paintings show variations in coat colors and textures, some for winter and others for summer, some with clear dapples. Inevitably, the horses drew my attention as we walked farther and farther along the narrowing gallery. Suddenly we came upon a turn in the cave and the stunning image of a horse falling down the shaft at the end, showing what would have happened to us had we not been guided. It was a physical surprise, a blow, to see this image, famous and familiar though it was.
We turned and went back, this time taking a turn through the narrow, low-ceiling Lateral Passage to enter the Chamber of Engravings. There were hundreds, maybe thousands of engravings of animals frantically scratched into the cave walls and ceiling, chaotically tumbling one over the other, obscuring, redefining, superimposed with some special meaning, I cannot tell. Nearer the ground most of the images are of aurochs, Europe's wild cattle, then above them deer, and above them horses that cover the domed ceiling.
Beyond the confusion of engravings, we descended again -- the poet sadly could not follow us here -- and we came to the narrow, twisting Shaft of the Dead Man. To the left, moving away from the other figures, was a rhinoceros with its tail up, nervously leaving droppings as it goes. I have seen exactly this posture so many times in Africa that I could almost hear the plopping of the dung, spread wide by the rhino's swishing tail. The middle figure was a falling or possibly dead man with an erect penis, but he had a strange head with a birdlike beak or mask. There was also a linear object topped with a bird figure that might be a staff or a spear near the man's right hand. Charging the man was a bison, its head lowered to gouge with its sharp horns. An object usually interpreted as a spear sticks into the bison that seems to have been partially disemboweled, causing the bison's ferocious attack. What does this vignette mean? Is it a moral story, a warning about hunting bison? Or is the true significance of the painting simply its bold being, its mysterious and hugely affecting representation of a dangerous event of great importance?
We turned back through the Chamber of Engravings and entered the wider Main Gallery. There we found more horses, bison, cows, ibex, and a smattering of enigmatic geometrical signs: dots, subdivided rectangles, cross-hatching. These have caused scholars to argue whether they represent nets or traps, mystical symbols, or hallucinations at the beginning of a shamanistic trance. Some signs demarcate the spots in caves with the best echoes and acoustic resonance. There are two massive red and black bisons, pictured tail to tail, and a charming frieze known as the swimming reindeer. Only the antlers, heads, and necks of the reindeer are shown, with their chins held up. The place where their bodies would be is occupied by a deep sinuous crack that seems to represent the river the reindeer are crossing.
At the end of the Main Gallery was a long, straight, narrowing passageway with few paintings or engravings. It seemed a long way to walk in the dark after the excitement and color of the other areas. Finally, the walls receded and the space enlarged. We were in the Gallery of the Felines. In addition to horses and bison, there were six exquisitely engraved felines that I identified as lionesses or small-maned lions. At the end, like a punctuation mark, were two rows of three red dots, placed one row over the other.
We had seen it all but to study each image would take years. We had to leave the cave before our very breath destroyed the art we had come to see.
We exited blinking, quietly, a little sadly. For a few minutes, there was nothing to say that could possibly express the experience we had been through, what we had witnessed. The sheer artistic grandeur of Lascaux was breathtaking. To see it was an incomparable privilege....
Seeing Lascaux, I understood viscerally for the first time what prehistoric art was about.
Prehistoric art is a communication - a heartfelt scream of meaning - from our ancient past that is so powerful we can still hear it today. I don't know what the even more ancient geometric signs in Blombos Cave, South Africa, meant, or for that matter, the geometric signs in many of the famous and later European, African, or Asian caves mean, but I know what Lascaux means: Animals. Animals are important and this is what they are like. You must remember this!
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Excerpt from Pat Shipman, 2011, THE ANIMAL CONNECTION. W. W. Norton & Co.
Photo by C. Cabrol of Pech-Merle horses © The Center for Prehistory of Pêch-Merle, Cabrerets, France. Any commercial use prohibited.
Photo of Appaloosa horse by Jerry Keenan.
