Lascaux Painting

Posted: November 27, 2008 
Filed under: Prehistoric Art
Tagged: cave, Caves, human history, hunter gatherer, lascaux cave, limestone walls, neanderthal, neanderthal man, neanderthals, paleolithic age, religious apparitions, southwestern france
Comments: Leave a Comment

Description

For more than 17 000 years, the bestiary of the Lascaux cave in southwestern France has survived the ravages of human history. Anyone entering this time capsule is confronted by four metre long bulls that appear to float across the massive vaults like religious apparitions. An enigmatic spotted beast with a round snout and straight, forward-pointing horns, plump horses in brilliant yellow and deer with treelike antlers-all seem in equal part intimates of the present and missives from some distant world. Which they are. Though the draftsmanship is strikingly Modernist – on exiting the cave in 1940, Pablo Picasso said, “We have invented nothing” – these creatures were painted and inscribed on the limestone walls during the Upper Paleolithic age, when everyone was a hunter-gatherer, and Homo sapiens coexisted with Neanderthal man.