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Archeologist Jean Clottes received a remarkable gift last Christmas, when cave explorers stumbled upon a cave filled with dramatic prehistoric paintings. Although some three hundred decorated caves have been found across Europe, the latest also promises to be one of the best, rivalling in imagery the famous sites of Lascaux and Altamira. The new cave is called Grotte Chauvet, after co-discoverer Jean-Marie Chauvet, who works as a guard at other decorated cave sites. The entrance lies near the base of a limestone cliff near the French village of Vallon-Pont-d'Arc, not far from the Rhyne Valley.


Clottes, the Scientific Advisor on Decorated Caves for the French Ministry of Culture and Chairman of the International Committee on Rock Art, has made three journeys into Grotte Chauvet and hopes to lead future studies of the new site and its archeological significance. He discussed the cave last March while in San Francisco for the Academy's symposium, "Beyond Art: Upper Paleolithic Image and Symbol."


Because every previous discovery of painted caves has led to charges of fakery, Clottes was prepared to play devil's advocate regarding the new find. Upon seeing the three-foot-high entrance hole, Clottes was unimpressed and doubted whether vast chambers awaited beyond. To fit inside, he had to leave behind his spelunking helmet and inch forward on his stomach, his arms extended ahead, through a constricting passage. He reached a 30-foot dropoff and climbed down the explorers' ladder through the ceiling of the cave. What Clottes saw next stunned him.


Gleaming stalactites hung from the ceiling, and thick calcite covered cave bear skulls and bones scattered on the floor. Bear prints and claw marks seemed to be everywhere. And ancient artists had covered much of the walls with red and black images. "A cave that has been visited by lots of people has a sort of worn look," says Clottes, "and this one looked brand-new." Indeed, he and his colleagues were the first human visitors for thousands of years.


The slow-forming calcite obscuring some of the images offered a clue that these were genuine Paleolithic paintings. Other clues were the erosion of several images by time and by the claws of long-extinct cave bears, and the discovery of engravings 15 feet up on a wall, made when the cave floor was several feet higher than today.


Each of the four chambers in the 1,500-foot-long cave contains prehistoric art. Clottes has seen 197 animal images, Chauvet has counted 263, and the total number may reach around 300. The images include a diverse assemblage of animals as well as panels of colored dots, geometric figures, and positive and negative human hand stencils. With the exception of two yellow horse heads, the paintings are all red or black, and black images are more common deep inside the cave.


Studies from other caves show that red pigments come from iron oxide and black pigments from manganese dioxide or charcoal. Working with colleagues Michel Menu and Philippe Walter of the Louvre Museum's research laboratory in Paris, Clottes demonstrated that in Niaux, a painted cave in the French Pyrenees, the artists employed two distinct paint recipes that used different mineral extenders to help spread the pigment smoothly, make it stick, and prevent cracking after it dried. The recipes were shown by the scientists to have value as approximate indicators of when paintings were made. At three other Pyrenees sites, the artists added a plant or animal grease binder to the pigment--essentially inventing oil paint.


In the Chauvet cave, Clottes was immediately struck by the number of woolly rhinoceros on the walls. Fewer than two dozen images of rhinos were known from all other European caves, spanning a creative period of some 20,000 years. But Chauvet contains at least 45 rhinos. Other paintings depict a dozen animal species, including lions, cave bears, mammoths, aurochs, ibex, Irish elk, and the more typical bison and horses. The first recorded images of a panther and an owl were also found. One enigmatic figure with gangly legs and spotted flanks has been interpreted as a hyena.


The new cave's preponderance of predators will force rethinking of the long held idea that such dangerous animals were peripheral in the Paleolithic worldview, based on their rarity in cave painting. Pioneering scholar Andre Leroi-Gourhan saw a pattern in French caves that he read as a mythological formula. Sixty percent of the images were of horses or bison, while only ten percent depicted bears, rhinos, or felines, and these predators were painted in the darker recesses of caves. The Chauvet cave breaks this pattern.


Clottes speculates that Chauvet's paintings may have been inspired by the "presence of the bear"--the bones, footprints, scratch marks, even the smell that lingered after hibernating cave bears left. The drawing of dangerous animals may have been a response to the frequent occupation by a fearsome and formidable mammal. Despite a few fire pits, Chauvet contains no evidence that humans ever lived there.


The Chauvet paintings also exhibit unique elements of style. Some rhinos have fantastically elongated horns and distinctively curled ears. Elsewhere, artists often scraped a rock surface before applying pigment, to create a white outline accenting an animal's body. In contrast, many images at Chauvet show fine shading to highlight body parts such as the manes of horses, or incorporate natural textures of the rock. The head of one bison, appearing on a rock surface, forms a right angle with the painted body. The cave's largest single frieze includes a dozen rhinos drawn from various angles.


"You can see how deliberately they have been playing with perspective," says Clottes. An eye for distinguishing detail is evident as well, for instance in one series of four horse heads in profile. "They were made by the same hand for sure, yet each looks different," says Clottes, who was clearly impressed by these portraits. "This is not scientific, of course, but I had the impression of being in front of the work of a really great master." He believes that a single artist created the most magnificent paintings, while others that appear stilted and lack subtlety probably belong to another creator.


"These things are not what anybody walking down the valley could have done," agrees archeologist Margaret Conkey of the University of California at Berkeley. Conkey concurs with the likelihood that many were made by one artist, or, more intriguingly, by a small group following the same stylistic conventions.


If so, the paintings may all date to a narrow span of time. And Clottes is convinced that the paintings predate those of Lascaux by thousands of years. Lascaux was decorated during the Magdalenian period, the heyday of Paleolithic painting that lasted from about 17,000 to 10,000 years ago. But judging from the style of its paintings, Clottes thinks Chauvet dates to the preceding Solutrean period or even earlier, which means the paintings could be at least 20,000 years old. "This is not the way a Magdalenian would do it," insists Clottes. "I've lived with Magdalenians for a very long time and I know them very well."


So far, only six European decorated caves have been dated directly using an advanced radiocarbon method that requires only a tiny sample of charcoal from a painting. The oldest known cave art in Europe comes from the site of Cosquer on the coast of southern France. This underwater cavern discovered by scuba divers in 1991 contains numerous paintings and engravings made 27,000 and 19,000 years ago. One black hand stencil has a radiocarbon date of 27,110 years ago, plus or minus 350 years. Ongoing exploration of Cosquer late last year revealed 45 new animal engravings and eight hand stencils among other symbolic markings.


Clottes, who has also led investigations of Cosquer's art (his book on that site, written with Jean Courtin, will soon be published by Abrams in English), now plans to collect radiocarbon dating samples from charcoal images, torch marks, and bear bones from Chauvet. Calcite formations covering some paintings might also be dated to provide a minimum age for the artwork. Other noninvasive research, including pigment analysis and ultraviolet photography, will be conducted. Until then, Chauvet cave has been resealed until a gate can be installed to protect the site. With an illustrious research career already behind him, Clottes eagerly awaits the chance to study this pristine piece of the human past.

Blake Edgar is Associate Editor of California Wild.

Summer 1995

Vol. 48:3