La Marche Cave :: Faces From The Ice Age

BBC NEWS | Science/Nature | Faces from the Ice Age

In the two posts immediately prior to this one, I discussed various video presentations which addressed the pre- and Clovis era, which took place in America some 13,000 years ago. By means of a somewhat tenuous connection to the human faces found drawn at La Marche cave, dating from the European Magdalenian era of around 15,000 years ago, I'd like to draw readers' attention to another video, which looks briefly at La Marche, and begins by relating the exploits of King Clovis. The linked film is called 'Val de Civeaux - Terre de Mémoire', runs for around 25 minutes, and gives a good detailed history of the region of the Civeaux valley.

At 2 minutes in, there is footage of some of the plaques of La Marche, as described by Jean Airvuax, who makes another appearance in this post, regarding the 27,000 year old human face depicted at Vilhonneur cave. The rest of the film is well worth watching, taking in the Roman era, as well as commenting on the later Merovingian influence in the area.

Regarding Frankish King Clovis, we are told that he was fighting a battle (against Alaric II, in 507 at Vouillé), and needed to cross the flooded river of Vienne; according to the story, a dog appeared and proceeded to cross the flooded river, which in turn afforded Clovis the opportunity to make the crossing in safety with his troops. Since then, this crossing point has become known as Le Gué de la Biche, whilst another nearby landmark, Font Chrétien, gained its name after (it is rumoured) Clovis' horse kicked a rock, whereupon fresh water for his troops and horses appeared, thus solving the problem posed by the river having become so thick with blood, during the battle, that it had been rendered unpotable.

According to this page, the Gué de la Biche is near the caves at Lussac, but it is the cave of La Marche which is of most interest with regards to this post. My initial interest was sparked by a recent post over at Leherensuge regarding the baldness gene, and a comment therein on how bald people were depicted back in the Magdalenian era, around 15,000 years ago. I thought it would be worth re-visiting a report from a while back, in which it was claimed that the oldest known human facial depictions had been discovered carved into rock plaques, in La Marche cave, situated near Vienne, in France. This from BBC News, May, 2002...

The faces on this page were discovered carved on the floor of a cave at La Marche in the Lussac-les-Chateaux area of France.

The cave system was discovered in 1937 by French scientist Leon Pencard, who excavated it for five years. Over 1,500 slabs were found on which images were etched.

The pictures are difficult to interpret. Sometimes several images are superimposed on one another. But to the trained and expectant eye they reveal extraordinary wonders. From the La Marche caves there are lions, bears, antelope, horses - and 155 lifelike human figures. These images of "real people" - male and female faces, people in robes, hats and boots - may date back 15,000 years. This was long before the rise of the great civilisations and a time when Europe was firmly in the grip of an Ice Age.

I've had some difficulty in tracking down all the images - I'm fairly sure that around that time many, if not all the drawings were online, possibly at TRACCE, but a cursory search there failed to come up with the goods. However I do recall thinking how modern they seemed, reminding me for some reason of cartoons drawn around the time of the French Revolution, such was the vivid, somewhat garish style in which humans were depicted.

Indeed, when the engravings were first discovered by Stéphane Lwoff, in the late 1930s, contemporary academic opinion held that work of such competence would have been beyond the supposedly limited artistic abilities of so-called cavemen, as we see from this post...

There, under the rock overhang, which once also hosted a wine cellar, the two scholars began digging in August of 1937. Soon, they were rewarded by a treasure trove of paleolithic artifacts - and a small pile of engraved tablets. Realizing that they had found a virtual Stone-Age gallery, Lwoff wisely summoned top authorities. Abbé Breuil himself was a witness to the excavations from the clearly undisturbed prehistoric strata.

But, when Lwoff had presented the La Marche discovery at the 1941 session of the French Prehistorical Society, he failed to mention the site's extensive verification. Without dallying, Lwoff's colleagues had judged his report for themselves on the spot, and collectively upholding the tradition that the greatest Magdalenian Art discoveries be greeted with scorn and disbelief, accused Lwoff of brazen fraud.

The art was too modern, too sophisticated, too good - they said - it was inconceivable that such art could be the work of Cavemen!

Indeed, La Marche breaks all kinds of Stone-Age art conventions. Unheard of for the art, La Marche treats us to human portraits styled as caricatures. Most male faces are clean shaven, but we also see stylish goatees, and moustaches.

These Magdalenians wore fashionably cut clothes. They had soled and heeled boots. Lamall0.gif shows an appendage on Athena's boot, which in all likelihood depicts a real heel. The attire is sometimes topped by big hats, often helmet-like.

The article goes on to compare the subsequent ordeal undergone by Lwoff to that endured by de Sautuola back in 1880, who along with his grand-daughter, had made the discovery at Altamira, Cantabria, the site where the first known Palaeolithic art was (eventually) first accepted to have been authentic.

The plaques at La Marche are to this day, largely undiscussed, but looking through the various images, both at the style of pictorial content, and the way in which images overlay older ones, certainly gives me the impression that they date from antiquity - I'm not sure exactly how the pictures on the plaques can be definitively dated, but if they came from undisturbed stratigraphy that has been firmly dated, their validity would appear to be beyond question.

Moreover, in June 2006, came news from another location in France, namely the cave at Vilhonneur, that a depiction of a human face, dating to 27,000 years ago, had been discovered etched into the cave wall, as we see from this article, at The Times...

The 27,000-year-old work was found by a local pensioner, Gérard Jourdy, in the Vilhonneur grotto near Angoulême.

Drawn with calcium carbonate, and using the bumps in the wall to give form to the face, it features two horizontal lines for the eyes, another for the mouth and a vertical line for the nose. “The portrait of this face is unique,” said Jean Airvaux, a researcher at the French Directorate of Cultural Affairs. “We have other drawings, but they are more recent. Here, it could be the oldest representation of a human face.”

Archaeologists are particularly interested in the Vilhonneur cave because there are several drawings, including one of a hand in cobalt blue, along with animal and human remains.

Jean-François Baratin, the regional director of archaeology in western France, said that there were only two known examples of prehistoric caves from this era containing both bones and drawings. The other is at Cussac in the Dordogne.

The face on the wall at Vilhonneur is radically different in many ways from the later plaques of Lussac/La Marche, and here's what Jonathan Jones at The Guardian had to say about Vilhonneur...

No one is ever going to put a name to this face. Its owner lived before writing, agriculture, or towns existed, before there were states that kept records, and long before a Greek man named Herodotus decided to write something called "history". The only reason we can be sure the people who painted in caves during the Ice Age were as human as we are - that is, they used their brains in the same way we do - is that they made art. No other animal makes art. And now the earliest art has a human face - literally.

The eye is a bold horizontal slash that connects to a downward diagonal apparently signifying a nose; below is a thinner line suggesting a mouth. These features are drawn in black on a face-shaped rocky mass in a cave near Angoulême in western France; discovered in February, the image has only now been made public after scientific testing by French archaeologists that has apparently convinced them of its authenticity and age - they claim the drawings in it were done 27,000 years ago, which makes the Vilhonneur grotto one of the oldest sites of rock art in the world, predated only by Chauvet in the Ardèche (32,410 years old) and some of the paintings at Cosquer in Bouches-du-Rhône (28,370 years old).

Although the Magdalenian plaques of some 12,000 years later appear to be more sketch-like, it's notable that some 1500 of them were considered to of sufficient importance for their creators, or at least owners, to store them in the depths of a cave.

Whether the artists were depicting each other, their family, friends or notable others, we don't know, any more than we know what prompted someone to sit down and produce so much work in the first place, although because many of the images seem to be not quite human, rather drawings of human faces with odd features included in such a way as to slightly distort reality. There are other depictions from the same era of the Palaeolithic that appear to be zoomorphic or anthropomorphic, weird mixtures of human and beast, that to this day, defy easy explanation.

Although the artists at La Marche also included an impressive array of wildlife in their etchings, mainly reindeer and horse, although a fish and various small animals, such as a hare, were also drawn or painted, it is the human portraits which marks out this Lussac cave as being unique in the known artwork of the Late Palaeolithic Magdalenian era.

Whether any future work will, or needs to be, carried out in this cave isn't mentioned, but I'd be surprised if a half-decent exhibition wasn't put together at some stage, in order that the wider public might be made aware of just how some of our distant ancestors were portrayed, albeit in a (cave) light that wasn't always as flattering as we like to portray our modern selves. To finish up, it's back to the BBC News article, which includes some comment from Michael Rappenglueck...

"They have been completely overlooked by modern science," Dr Rappenglueck told BBC News Online. "They were mentioned in a few books many decades ago and dismissed as fakes - and since then nothing."

The portraits were carved into limestone slabs that were then carefully placed on the floor. The illustrations are not the stick-like figures seen in prehistoric cave paintings such as the images in the more famous Lascaux cave system that probably date back 17,000 years; or at Chauvet that go back more than 30,000 years.

However, it has sometimes been asked why the animals painted on the walls of such caves are so much more lifelike than the human forms depicted with them. Could it be because the more sophisticated human pictures were placed on the floor, asks Dr Rappenglueck?

In more recent times, faces have been depicted on floors with the express intention of driving home the point that the person depicted had been conquered in some way, or as we know from the Classical era, incorporated into floor mosaics in Roman villas, for example - why cave floors might have been used in this fashion during the Magdalenian, is less clear.

see also...

La Grotte de La Marche

Patrimoine Préhistoire Archéologie Vienne (scroll down to view film mentioned above)

La Marche - A Stone Age Academy

Colour images of La Marche plaques

Anthropolitical Motivations (this article includes a couple of La Marche images, and is thus vaguely related, although the gist of the text itself is what I'd euphemistically term as 'idiosyncratic')