The Anthropocene Reviewed(11)

After World War II, the French government took ownership of the site, and the cave was opened to the public in 1948. Marcel and Jacques both served as tour guides. When Pablo Picasso saw the cave paintings on a visit that year, he reportedly said, “We have invented nothing.”



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The cave is not particularly large—only about ninety meters deep—but it contains nearly two thousand paintings. Aside from the animals, hundreds of abstract shapes are painted on the walls, most commonly red and black circles.

What might these symbols mean? We can’t know. There are so many mysteries at Lascaux: Why, for instance, are there no paintings of reindeer, which we know were the primary source of food for the Paleolithic humans who lived in that cave? Why is the human form so rarely depicted?* Why are certain areas of the cave filled with images, including pictures on the ceiling that required the building of scaffolding to create, while other areas have only a few paintings? And were the paintings spiritual? Here are our sacred animals. Or were they practical? Here is a guide to some of the animals that might kill you.

At Lascaux, there are also some “negative hand stencils,” as they are known to art historians. These paintings were created by pressing one hand with fingers splayed against the wall of the cave, and then blowing pigment, leaving the area around the hand painted. Similar hand stencils have been found in caves around the world. We’ve found memories of hands from up to forty thousand years ago from Indonesia to Australia to Africa to the Americas. These hand stencils remind us of how different life was in the distant past—amputations, likely from frostbite, were common in Europe, and so you often see negative hand stencils with three or four fingers. Life was difficult and often short: As many as a quarter of women died in childbirth, and around 50 percent of children did not live to the age of five.

But the hand stencils also remind us that humans of the past were as human as we are. Their hands were indistinguishable from ours. More than that, we know they were like us in other ways. These communities hunted and gathered, and there were no large caloric surpluses, so every healthy person would have had to contribute to the acquisition of food and water—and yet somehow, they still made time to create art, almost as if art isn’t optional for humans.

We see all kinds of hands—child and adult—stenciled on cave walls around the world, but almost always the fingers are spread, like my kids’ hand stencils. I’m no Jungian, but it’s fascinating and a little strange that so many Paleolithic humans, who couldn’t possibly have had any contact with one another, created the same types of paintings using similar techniques—techniques that we are still using to paint hand stencils.

But then again, what the Lascaux art means to me is likely different from whatever it meant to the people who made it. The paeloanthropologist Genevieve von Petzinger has theorized that the abstract dots and squiggles found in cave paintings may have been an early form of written language, with a consistent set of meanings even across broad distances.

What was the motivation for the negative hand stencils? Perhaps they were part of religious rituals, or rites of passage. Some academics theorize that the hand stencils were part of hunting rituals. Or maybe the hand is just a convenient model situated at the end of the wrist. To me, though, the hand stencils say, “I was here.” They say, “You are not new.”



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The Lascaux cave has been closed to the public for many years now—too many people breathing inside of it led to the growth of mold and lichens, which has damaged some of the art. Just the act of looking at something can ruin it, I guess. The cave’s tour guide discoverers, Marcel Ravidat and Jacques Marsal, were among the first people to note the impact of contemporary humans on the ancient human art.

They were reunited with their codiscoverers Simon Coencas and Georges Agniel for the first time in 1986. After that, the “little gang” met regularly until one by one, they passed away. Simon Coencas was the last to die—in early 2020, at the age of ninety-three. So now the people who found Lascaux are gone, and Lascaux itself is sealed off from view, visited only by the scientists working to preserve it. But tourists can still visit imitation caves, called Lascaux II, Lascaux III, and Lascaux IV, in which the artwork has been meticulously re-created.

Humans making fake cave art to save real cave art may feel like Peak Anthropocene absurdity, but I confess I find it overwhelmingly hopeful that four kids and a dog named Robot discovered a cave containing seventeen-thousand-year-old handprints, that the two teenagers who could stay devoted themselves to the cave’s protection, and that when humans became a danger to that cave’s beauty, we agreed to stop going.

We might have graffitied over the paintings, or kept on visiting them until the black mold ate them away entirely. But we didn’t. We let them live on by sealing them off.

The cave paintings at Lascaux exist. You cannot visit. You can go to the fake cave we’ve built, and see nearly identical hand stencils, but you will know: This is not the thing itself, but a shadow of it. This is a handprint, but not a hand. This is a memory that you cannot return to. And to me, that makes the cave very much like the past it represents.

I give the cave paintings at Lascaux four and a half stars.





SCRATCH ’N’ SNIFF STICKERS



SMELL IS ONE OF THE LAST REALMS where virtual reality still feels deeply virtual. Recently, I found myself at a theme park riding a VR roller coaster that felt breath-stealingly real. It wasn’t just that falling felt like falling and turning felt like turning; I even felt the mist on my face as I flew through ocean spray.