A small, delicate painting of a woolly rhinoceros in Chauvet Pont d’Arc cave. Experts believe this painting started as a cave bear but was later modified to represent a cave hyena.Ī collapse sealed the cave’s original entrance some 21,000 years ago. A painting of European cave hyenas (Crocuta crocuta spelaea) in Chauvet cave, France. 26,000-year-old horse mud glyphĪlthough we have no way of knowing exactly what the images meant to their creators, the existence of such a Sistine Chapel of ancient art forever quashed the idea that our “primitive” ancestors somehow lacked the intellectual sophistication of modern humans. Subsequent studies proved the images to be up to 37,000 years old. Many of the depicted animal species had gone extinct or vanished from Europe thousands of years before. This passage leads to the lower levels of the cave and features a woolly rhino and a Megaloceros, both animals long extinct. The Passage of the Megaloceros in Chauvet Cave. Flickering ancient torchlight would have gifted movement to the magnificent creatures. The artists had created images of cave lions and panthers, woolly rhinos, hyenas, bison, megaloceros, and mammoths among cave bears, an owl, horses, stags, ibex, musk oxen, and the outline of a human hand. Our distant ancestors had used perspective, shading, and the natural contours of the cave to enhance the aesthetic glories of the Ice Age menagerie roaming the walls. The skills of the artists shone through the dim eons. Aurochs (Bos primigenius) on the wall of Chauvet Cave, Ardèche France They stood in awe, surrounded by paintings, charcoal drawings, and etchings of transcendent artistic beauty. They obviously weren’t the cave’s first human visitors, for artwork of unimaginable antiquity covered the walls. A detailed photograph of 2 woolly rhinoceros on the wall of Chauvet pont d’Arc cave in France. A portion of the Horse Panel in Chauvet Cave, France. Inside, they discovered a previously unknown cave filled with paleolithic cave paintings. Chauvet cave is in the cliff on the left side of the abandoned oxbow. An aerial view of the gorge of the Ardèche with its natural bridge. A team of explorers lead by Jean-Marie Chauvet squeezed through a tiny rock opening in the gorge of the Ardèche River in Southern France. The discovery of Chauvet Pont d’Arc cave on Decemshocked the world.
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