Ice Age Art: Contemporary Resonances, Part 2

František Kupka, Reconstruction of the Chapelle-Aux Saints Neanderthal Man, based on the theories of Marcellin Boule (1909).

Continued from Part 1

Loire Valley: How Artistic Were the Neanderthals?

In June 2023, a sensational article appeared in the journal PLOS One entitled “The Earliest Unambiguous Engravings by Neanderthals on Cave Walls: La Roche-Cotard, Loire Valley, France.” An international team of twenty-five experts, led by Jean-Claude Marquet, proved that the cave could only have been entered by Neanderthals. Geological evidence shows that the only access point was slowly sealed by sediments at least fifty-one thousand years ago, before the entrance reappeared during quarrying work in 1847 and the first excavations took place in 1912. According to everything we know so far, there were no Homo sapiens in this part of the world fifty-one thousand years ago.1 

Excavations in front of the La Roche-Cotard cave also clearly indicate traces of Neanderthals. Inside, they left behind so-called finger flutings—lines drawn into a soft, film-like layer of rock above the hard tuff beneath it. Dorota Wojtczak from the University of Basel, a specialist in experimental archaeology and traces-of-use research, has examined the nature of these finger marks. They were recorded in detail, including with a 3D scanner. Wojtczak attempted to recreate the finger flutings using tools made of stone, wood, and bone—and with her bare fingers. “This research clearly showed,” she has explained, “that the cave marks were not made with tools, but by scratching with human fingers.”2 

I contact Jean-Claude Marquet, leader of the excavation. He agrees to take me into the cave. It is located in the middle of a private castle park in the Loire Valley, three hours south of Paris, and is not open to the public, not least because it is no larger than a three-room apartment. The eighty-five-year-old Marquet, still very agile, switches on LED lamps. It is as if the cave were his living room. He began exploring it back in the 1970s. Directly opposite us are the finger engravings, mostly indentations made with several fingers at the same time. They are manageable in size, no more than shoulder width, spread across two walls in eight different places, all at about eye level or slightly below. Human scale. 

We take a long look at each of the eight panels. The longest is the “triangular panel.” Vertical finger grooves are grouped around a vertical axis, apparently made with three to four fingers at the same time, from top to bottom. At the bottom, you can see the material that was removed when the grooves were made. It is careful, deliberate work. Marquet asks me what I see, as if it were part of a survey that has been going on for decades. Pareidolia is the ability to recognize figures in abstract or random patterns, and mine is going crazy: a bird, a bat, a lap between legs, the heads of two horses, two mammoths. Silly, I know. But I can't help it, the images are unstoppable.

And it’s not a matter of somehow attributing figurative images to the Neanderthals. It is exciting enough to assume intentional traces that served no immediate functional purpose. In any case, it is clear that this did not happen by chance; no one accidentally slid along the wall here. I ask Marquet what he himself sees. He stands up and supports his hesitant monologue with his hands, imitating—performing, reenacting—the furrowing motion, from top to bottom with a flick at the end. It is an intentional image composition. He is moved, but does not allow himself to be carried away into making figurative references. Rather, he emphasizes that it is a matter of appreciating the habitual, perhaps ritualistic dimension of the engravings, which must be more than fifty-one thousand years old. Perhaps significantly older.

Panel of Rhinoceros and Lions, Chauvet-Pont-d’Arc Cave (Ardèche). Photo: J. Clottes. Thanks to the Ministry of Culture of France for permission to reproduce.

Ardèche: How Old Is the Art?

There is a new desire to be wary of. People want to backdate everything, make it even older, even more amazing, perhaps under the guise of local patriotism or even nationalism. This can lead to scientific data being interpreted with confirmation bias. What scientist wouldn’t want to have discovered the oldest work of art in human history? “Humanity’s 1st Great Masterpiece” is the bold claim made on the website of Chauvet 2, the true-to-scale replica of the cave that opened in 2015. 

Whether that self-titling is accurate or not, the images are magnificent, even as replicas. The series of horse heads creates a sense of perspective, while a clever blurring technique produces the spatial illusion of shading and physical volume. Lions sniffing each other are captured with a keen eye for natural behavior. In a niche-shaped rock recess, it is as if entire herds of animals are moving toward or away from the lowest point—and in the center is a small horse (Peter Piller pointed out its central position to me). One may speculate about the meaning; in any case, it is a crafty, cunning work of art (while not calling it “art” but merely “images” becomes a ridiculous gesture). But there are also collections of red dots, as in Chufín. Or a frieze of rhinos reminiscent of Rouffignac. It is like a “best-of” of European caves. With bonus tracks.

Chauvet raises a thousand questions. Here is just one that is particularly controversial: How old is this art? The debate has been raging for decades. A team commissioned by the French Ministry of Culture has insisted on several occasions—most recently in a paper published in 2016—that significant parts of it are at least thirty-six thousand years old.3 In 2020, critics followed up, pointing out contradictions in the interpretation of the dating data and noting a “bias in the sample selection”; only evidence that confirmed the claimed time horizons had been taken into account. The three authors speak, not entirely without justification, of “Chauvet-nism”: the addictive tendency to date things as older rather than younger.4  

Chauvet’s art is magnificent enough, even if its highlights are “only” twenty to sixteen thousand years old. And, just to remind you, these are time spans—eighteen thousand years ago is four times as old as the Giza pyramids—which exceed any experience-based imagination of tradition and development. And with the Sulawesi cave painting dated to fifty-one thousand years ago or older, the “1st Great Masterpiece” line also becomes cheeky. Reflecting on the significance and meaning of these works cannot be untied from when they were made, but it should also not be constricted by it. Ironically, these reflections often seem to have been very much tied to their time.

Drawing Conclusions

The oldest explanation, dating back to the discoveries of the nineteenth century, is that the somewhat dim-witted Ice Age hunters spent their “free time” relaxing in caves, dabbling in playful painting, and thus creating marvels en passant. Next, in the twentieth century, the theory arose that it was totemism, i.e., a spiritual, proto-religious invocation of animals as ancestors, as higher beings, or both. The twin of this theory is, in turn, that of animal depiction as a hunting incantation: a trophy show or an attempt to magically favor future kills. 

Next came the fertility and sex theory in the postwar period, according to which bison, horses, etc. represented a male-female principle and ancestral lines. This was followed in the 1970s and ’80s by the triumph of the shaman theory: artists were said to have ritually recorded visions they had while in a trance induced by drugs, dance, and music. Inspired by ethnographic observations, conclusions were drawn about prehistoric times. It is absurdly obvious how strongly these explanations are ideologically influenced by their respective eras.

The theory of naive, playful cave artists emerged when the bourgeois elite of the late nineteenth century contrasted the ideal of l’art pour l’art with vulgar mass art. The totemism and hunting theories were fed by early modern ethnology in the first half of the twentieth century, which was inevitably also a product of colonialism and imperial warfare. The gender/sex thesis arose in equal parts from psychoanalysis and postwar French structuralism. The shamanism thesis, in turn, expanded totemism to include the New Agey impulses of the hippie era.

Diego Gárate Maidagán’s sober, digitally materialistic approach is also typical of our times. Using the latest technology and data collection, the means of production and the traces of labor are reconstructed in the final result—you could say in a thoroughly neo-Marxist sense. We have turned away from the overly speculative interpretations of the past.

But there is a danger in that. If this approach is exaggerated (which Maidagán himself cannot be accused of), Ice Age art becomes merely a forensic, socioeconomic, or zoological trace. Down to the fetishization of dating itself. Qualification is not balanced with, but replaced by, quantification. So what can be done? We must acknowledge how, to generalize, ideologically influenced each of these approaches was at their respective time—and at the same time that they all contain kernels of truth that can be pieced together.

Different uses and functions are not mutually exclusive, from sacred rituals to mundane everyday activities. Here, young children and highly trained artists, amateurs and professionals, often seem to have worked in the same place. Accordingly, much of prehistoric art itself is perhaps—forgive the modern term—multifunctional. It can symbolize myths (like a tarot card that can be both a source of origin stories as well as of predictions of the future), or trance rituals for that matter. At the same time, it can be a repository of knowledge, including playful and educational functions. And in all of this, it can also signify prestige and solemnity. 

This multifaceted nature parallels the classic subjects of art history. Consider the ecclesiastical art of the late Middle Ages and early modern period, which can also encompass all these aspects at the same time: myths of origin, predictions of the future, faith, knowledge, teaching, prestige, solemnity.

An article that appeared in the Cambridge Archaeological Journal in early 2023 stated that the dots, lines, and Y symbols found in many caves, such as Lascaux and Chauvet, in or around depictions of animals, corresponded to a kind of fertility calendar—if, depending on the animal species, the dots are associated with months and the Y with “giving birth.”5 According to this view, it was a kind of notation system for mating and breeding seasons, calculated from the end of winter (snowmelt). This theory is also probably not 100 percent watertight.

In any case, caution should be exercised with monothematic interpretations. If the thesis of the notation system is correct, we may overlook other things that do not appear as nonfigurative symbols. This could include the associated oral tradition, which obviously has been lost forever. If we reduce the images to their role as forensic traces of a single aspect of life (whether hunting, trance, or procreation), we are looking at them through the wrong end of binoculars and reducing them to mere signs. And even if, as in the case of the Neanderthals, they were supposedly “mere symbols”—i.e., dots, circles, or grid patterns—this raises the question of their deeper meaning all the more. Of what connects us as species.

Neither contemporary art nor art history can afford to continue ignoring the questions newly raised by cave art, delegating them solely to archaeology and paleoanthropology, as if saying: not our jurisdiction.  

Anyone who wants to continue taking art seriously as a whole must change this, with humanity as a whole in mind. Sorry if this sounds a little melodramatic, but as we all know, we are living at a time of multiple, global, planetary crises. The classic avant-garde movements of the 1910s and the pop culture of the 1960s established the ideal of a total “being in the now” as supposedly cool modernity, including a snide hubris towards the passé. This habitual ignorance of deeper levels of time has persisted into the digital present. It seems not only itself passé, but dangerously naive.

Hito Steyerl has vividly illustrated the need to consider different eras in relation to art, war, and caves. She recently shot a video in the Kurdish region of northern Iraq, not far from Shanidar Cave, where Neanderthal graves were discovered in the early 1960s (Steyerl’s resulting installation, Mechanical Kurds, is currently on display in Vienna at MAK until January 2026). In an interview, she said that she “noticed that people are retreating back into caves” because “they can’t be spied on by drones there. Some of these are caves where Neanderthals once lived. There is a worldwide movement back toward Neanderthalism.”6 

This is bitterly humorous, but not meant ironically. Steyerl refers to the Turkish army’s drones, which have spied on and attacked Kurdish positions. Kurdish rebels fought against Saddam Hussein from the Shanidar Cave in the 1980s. Amid multiple wars and increasingly totalitarian forms of rule in conjunction with digital technology, we are indeed moving forward into caves, even if only as an imaginary place of refuge. What will be decisive is what experiences and insights we come out with when we reemerge.  

An earlier first version of this piece, in German, appeared in Republik, August 30, 2025 →.