The art of being human

Visual Arts Just before Christmas in 1994, three potholers, including Jean-Marie Chauvet, were checking out a cave near Avignon in south-eastern France.

All three were experts in search of Upper Palaeolithic cave art. At the rear of the cave they felt a draught emanating from a pile of rubble. They carefully cleared away some stones to reveal a narrow tunnel stretching ahead for about 10 metres. Eliette Brunel Deschamps, the slightest of the party, squeezed her way through and found herself perched over a huge cavern.

Now very interested indeed, they fetched a rope ladder and made their way down into the main caves. Chauvet later said he thought he was dreaming. With reason. The caves that now bear his name were an archaeological find on a par with Lascaux and Altamira. More than 300 paintings and engravings were spread out before them on the walls of the complex. Vivid likenesses of bear, bison, mammoths, rhinoceroses and horses, together with other more obscure markings and images, crowded upon them.

As so often with Palaeolithic art dating back tens of thousands of years, what was especially disconcerting about the images was their immediacy and sophistication. We might think of our early ancestors as primitive, but finds like Chauvet collapse the gap between ourselves and them.

"Everything was so beautiful, so fresh . . . " Chauvet wrote. "Time was abolished." They felt themselves in the presence of the people who had made these marks.

We know a great deal about how they made the marks, but the question of why they made them is still hotly debated.

That is because while we recognise certain immediate aspects of the images, we have no ready access to their cultural symbolism. Return to Chauvet Cave is a superb documentary record and an invaluable source-book of information. While it significantly advances our knowledge of Chauvet, by and large it doesn't set out to argue a single consistent line of interpretation or motivation, although the subtitle, "Excavating the Birthplace of Art", does tend to nudge us towards a particular reading. Given the intrinsic qualities of the cave images, and the fact that Chauvet considerably pre-dates Lascaux and other sites, you can see the logic of describing it thus.

The beautifully reproduced images are truly stunning, highly complex, technically ingenious and made with sinuous, sensitive lines. But it seems unlikely that the mark-makers thought they were making art in any sense that we would now recognise the term. While the jumbled, overlapping images of animals are composed with an unmistakable aesthetic sense, they suggest not an aesthetic priority but an innate visual intelligence allied with considerable dexterity.

Jean Clottes is not only a world-renowned authority on Palaeolithic art. Together with David Lewis-Williams he has worked on developing an influential, highly detailed theory that places cave art in the context of developing human consciousness. Drawing on neuro-psychological ideas, they propose that such images as those at Chauvet were created during deliberately induced altered states of consciousness - something like a shamanistic trance - and strategically positioned in places that are thresholds between outer and spirit worlds. One thing is clear, however. Whatever the eventual judgement on such theories, Chauvet and comparable sites are crucial to any understanding of what it means to be human.

Aidan Dunne is Art Critic of The Irish Times

Return to Chauvet Cave Edited by Jean Clottes Thames & Hudson, 225pp, £45