Chauvet cave painting / Oldest painting in the world

. . . In 1988 he (Jean-Marie Chauvet) began a systematic survey on the region with Christian Hillaire and Eliette Brunel Deschamps, expert cavers themselves. In six years that followed, they found a number of new caves, 12 of which were decorated with ancient wall paintings. December 18 was a cold day, so Chauvet’s team decided to explore a sunny area at the entrance to the gorge. It was not particularly remote place, shepherds brought their flocks there, and presumably other spelunkers had been through many times. . . . .

Chauver’t team followed a mule path through the oaks and boxtrees untile they reached a cliff, and there they found a hole. The hole was largely big enough for them to stoop their way inside, and they soon found themselves in a downward-sloping passageway a few yards long. It might well have been a dead end, but among the rubble at the end of passageway they felt a slight draft.

The cavers ran a ladder from the passageway down to the gallery floor and descended into the darkness. Stalactites and stalagmites glittered like fangs in their flashlights. Columns of calcite were coated with jellyfish like tendrils. They moved deeper into the cave. A mammoth suddenly lurched into the light. Then a rhinoceros, then a trio of lions. The animals were painted across the cave walls, some alone, some in giant stampedes -- horses, owls, ibexes, bears, reindeer, bison -- interspersed with the outlines of hands and mysterious rows of red dots. The spelunkers were familiar with cave paintings, but they have never seen anything on such a scale. They were confronted by a menagerie of at least 400 animal images.

The cave, which has since been named after Chauver, is profoundly important, and now for the paintings themselves. Archaeologists have measured the carbon 14 in the charcoal in the paintings and used it to estimate their age. People were painting animals on the walls of the Chauvet cave at least 32,000 years ago. That makes them the oldest paintings in the world. ~ Page 294

IMAGE FROM

Humans did leave the mark of their hands. In these caves and caves in Patagonia, in the Sahara and Kalahari, in Indonesia, and in Australia, peoples with no cultural links covered rock walls with stencils of their hands, made by holding their hands to the cave wall and blowing dry or liquie pigment across them. Hand prints made by simply dipping one’s hand in colored clay and pressing it against the cave wall are rare. Archaeologists are baffled both by the universality of the hand silhouettes found in caves continents apart and by their possible significance. Should we see in them the impulse to make inert substance with the mark of human presence and will? But the stencils outline the absence of a hand. The hands vanished, leaving only the rock, or perhaps they vanished into the rock. ~ Page 68

Beeindruckend! HWW, Dinesh!

There's magic in that, in our past and our ancestors. How can there still be people who deny the theory of evolution?
HWW Dinesh, thanks for this.

HWW, Dinesh. Sehr gut. Viele Grüße!

HWW, Dinesh ! A very interesting series !