New Prehistoric Art Gallery

The pictures appearing on these pages --published for the first time outside of France--are from the walls of a cavern near Montignac, Dordogne, a limestone region where many similar, though less splendid, prehistoric finds have been made.

Several months ago the Montignac cavern was discovered by five striplings whose archeological adventuring had been encouraged by a retired schoolmaster named Laval. Its entrance was a vertical shaft which had long ago been filled so that cattle would not fall in. Townsfolk, as usual, were skeptical and hoax-wary over the boys' reports.

But France's foremost prehistorian, the Abbe Henri Breuil, soon inspected the pictures, pronounced them genuine and highly important. Early this year he managed to relay news of the discovery to the learned British journal, Nature. Archeologists and anthropologists world-over opened their eyes in amazement, then frowned wearily at the difficulty of getting adequate photographs through the confusion and censorship of Vichy. Last week TIME succeeded in bringing them out. The most interesting of them appear herewith.

Mind evolves. Date of these cave paintings is about 30,000 B.C.--the Paleolithic or Early Stone Age. It was a glacial epoch: the last continental ice sheet, retreating from northern Germany and Britain, still covered Scandinavia. The Alpine and Pyrenean glaciers shouldered far out into the adjoining plains; all Europe was cold, ranged over by reindeer, mammoths, woolly rhinoceroses (see cut, p. 50). Here, arriving probably by migration from North Africa, homo sapiens first appeared in Europe. The Cro-Magnon race inherited or seized the valleys of the small-brained, beetle-browed, long-armed, chinless and nigh speechless homo neandertalensis.

The Neanderthalers had no art. The first artists were the Cro-Magnon men, whose earliest culture-period is called the Aurignacian. The newfound cave at Montignac represents this glimmering dawn-culture on the vastest scale yet found. Its significance, says U.S. Prehistorian George Grant MacCurdy, is that the appearance of art "marks a distinct epoch in mental evolution." The Abbe Breuil calls the Montignac cave "the Sistine Chapel of Aurignacian art."*

Cro-Magnon man did not make elaborate pictures to decorate his home. The pictures are most often in inaccessible crags or in the remote recesses of inhabited caves. Nor did he make them from sheer love of beauty, for the pictures are often so superimposed, retouched and crowded as to be quite unesthetic. His motive was religious. The cavern murals are a form of sympathetic magic: depicting an animal gave the hunter power over it, made the kill easier. In the eerie, torchlit, painted chambers, professional sorcerers led the hunters in ceremonial dances before the chase. Sometimes they hurled their spears at the painted beasts or pictured in the paintings arrows, darts and traps to intensify the magic.

The pictured animals are always game, supremely important to a folk in a cold climate, ignorant of agriculture, crudely weaponed and without means of storing food. Commonest beast in cave murals is the horse, and bones in prehistoric garbage dumps show the horse was the chief game animal. In all cave art, male figures are far outnumbered by female figures, which were introduced only as symbols of fecundity to insure increase among the deer, bison and mammoths as well as women.

Technique. The earliest cave pictures were not painted but scratched on walls with sharpened flints. Profiles were absolute with but single fore and hind legs, and lacking were such details as hooves, eyes, hair and nostrils. But as Aurignacian scratching developed into painting, remarkable sophistication of draftsmanship appeared. In the Montignac group, stiffness of profile has relaxed and action abounds -- the beasts run, leap, browse, swim, lie down, chew their cuds. The head of an ancient long-horned cow (see cut) displays an excellent eye and nostril, subtle shading and dappling. To the Paleolithic artist, the more realistic was his picture, the more potent was its magic.

For painting the cave surface was prepared by scraping; then the figure was scratched in. By flickering lamplight the painters then went to work with three colors -- black, red and yellow oxides of iron and manganese. Insoluble in water, the pigments were mixed with grease. Grouped figures are seldom compositions; they merely represent use of all possible wall space.

In the Montignac cave, many tortured galleries still remain unexplored, many scratched figures still undeciphered. "There may yet be many surprises in store," observes Breuil, who knows that cave paintings are sometimes hidden a half-mile from the entrances. There may also be many undiscovered Paleolithic caves on both slopes of the Pyrenees. Today archeologists are more eager than ever to continue their explorations, but they fear that for years to come the prizes will fall only to French schoolboys.

* This phrase is an echo from the great cave at Altamira, Spain, where the Marquis of Sautuola first found and recognized prehistoric paintings in 1879. Altamira is commonly called "the Sistine Chapel of Magdelanian art," representing a Paleolithic culture about 10,000 years later than Montignac.

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