Painters in the Dark

Deep inside a cave in southern France, on a wall that no daylight has ever touched, a horse is running. It has been running for thirty-six thousand years. Whoever painted it, by the flicker of a burning wick in total darkness, understood shading and perspective and the suggestion of movement so completely that when the cave at Chauvet was discovered in 1994, some experts flatly refused to believe the dates, because the work was simply too accomplished to be so old. But the dates held, confirmed on the charcoal of the pigments themselves. This is not primitive art fumbling toward a skill it has not yet learned. This is a master's hand, and it stands near the very beginning of the tradition. And the beginning is older still than Europe: the oldest firmly dated figurative painting we have yet found is not in France at all but on the wall of a cave on the Indonesian island of Sulawesi, a life-sized portrait of a warty pig, dated by the slow growth of mineral over the paint to at least forty-five thousand five hundred years ago. Human beings, it turns out, did not learn to make great art gradually over the millennia. As far as the evidence can show us, we could do it almost from the moment we began, and we did it independently in Europe and in Asia, on opposite ends of the world, which means the capacity came with us out of Africa rather than being invented in any one place.

Stand back from the individual images and consider what their sudden abundance across the Upper Paleolithic actually means. In a great outpouring that once looked like an explosion and now looks more like a very long fuse finally reaching the powder, the symbolic mind spilled itself into the world through every medium it could lay hands on. People carved flutes from the hollow wing-bones of vultures and swans, precisely tuned instruments recovered from German caves and still playable today, roughly forty thousand years old, the oldest music that human hands can still hold. They shaped small figures of the human body, the so-called Venus figurines, from mammoth ivory and limestone and fired clay, and some of these are among the very first ceramics anyone ever made anywhere, fired not into useful pots but into images of ourselves, thousands of years before anyone thought to fire a bowl. At Lascaux, discovered by boys and a dog in 1940, some six hundred painted and fourteen hundred engraved images crowd the walls, including a great black aurochs more than five meters long, the largest single figure in all of cave art. They strung beads, painted their dead with red ochre, and laid them in the ground with grave goods, which is to say they had begun to treat death as something that carried meaning, to behave as though the story did not simply stop at the grave.

And then there is the strangest and most important object of the entire age, strange not for its beauty but for what it proves about the mind that made it. In a cave in southern Germany, someone around forty thousand years ago carved, from a single piece of mammoth tusk, a standing figure with the body of a man and the head of a lion. It is called the Lion-Man, and here is the thing to hold: there is no such creature. There never was. It is the oldest known image of something that does not exist. To carve it, a mind had to hold steadily in imagination a being it had never seen and could never see, assembled out of pieces of the real world into something entirely new, and then labor for what experiments suggest was hundreds of hours to drag that private inner vision out into shared, physical, standing form. That is the whole human revolution compressed into a single object smaller than a forearm. We had become the animal that could imagine what is not, and then reach into the world and make it so. Every god and every monster in the chapters to come, every hero and demon, and further off every cathedral, every constitution, every spacecraft, is descended in a direct line from whatever moved in the mind that first set a lion's head upon a human body.

We should be careful, though, before we award this whole revolution to ourselves alone, because the evidence has lately grown unsettling in a way that ties straight back to the last Part. On a cave wall at El Castillo in northern Spain, a simple red disk was dated, by the slow calcite creeping over it, to at least forty thousand eight hundred years ago, which is old enough that the only humans known to be in the region at the time were Neanderthals. The interpretation is debated, and we flag it as such, but it raises a real and humbling possibility: that our vanished cousins from Part III were making marks on cave walls before our own kind even arrived in Europe. And the breadth of it undoes the old story completely. Figurative painting turns up on Borneo around forty thousand years ago, entirely independent of Europe, half a world away; abstract marking in Africa runs back further still. The picture is no longer of a single European awakening but of a capacity that surfaces wherever symbolic humans, and perhaps not only our own species of human, are found. The painters used what the earth gave them, iron oxides for red and yellow, manganese for black, ground and mixed with fat and spit and blown through hollow bones or laid on with fingers and frayed twigs, and with that simple kit they made images that a trained modern eye can barely believe are the work of the Ice Age.

Why they made so much of it in the deep dark of the caves, we can only partly reconstruct, and here the book's discipline asks us to separate cleanly what we know from what we merely suspect. We know the greatest images cluster far in the interior, away from where anyone actually lived, in chambers you must crawl and wriggle through the black to reach. We know, from careful acoustic measurement, that the painted panels correlate strikingly with the very spots where a cave rings and resonates most strongly, as if image and sound were meant to go together, as though these were not galleries at all but instruments to be played. Many researchers, following the work of David Lewis-Williams, suspect the caves were ritual spaces, and that some of the imagery grew from the visions of people in deliberately altered states, since the geometric patterns that flicker behind closed human eyes in trance the world over also flicker, unmistakably, across these ancient walls. That reading is plausible, and partial, and unprovable in its particulars, and we hold it exactly that loosely. What is genuinely not in doubt is that people went down into the earth on purpose, at real risk, to make meaning in the dark, and that they carried a symbolic and very probably spiritual inner life every bit as rich and strange as the paintings are beautiful. One haunting scene at Lascaux shows a bird-headed man lying before a wounded bison, beside a staff topped with a bird; we will never be certain what it meant, but it is hard to look at it and not feel a mind reaching for something beyond the hunt.

We should also correct an old condescension here, plainly, because it matters for everything that follows in this book. This was not the clumsy childhood of art, a stammering phase soon outgrown on the road to us. Some of these traditions never ended at all. The Aboriginal peoples of Australia have been painting, singing, and telling their country for a span the archaeology now dates to sixty-five thousand years, the oldest continuous living culture on Earth, and their songlines have carried real, checkable knowledge, including accurate memories of specific coastlines that were drowned when the Ice Age ice melted and the seas rose, across hundreds of generations, entirely without writing. The painters in the dark were not stammering toward us across the ages. They already were us, complete and finished: imagining, worshipping, mourning, making music, counting the phases of the moon in notches on bone, and leaving on the walls of the world the unmistakable signature of minds that had fully, permanently woken up.

Those minds were about to be handed the hardest test their world had yet devised. The Ice Age was ending, and it was not going to end gently.