Cave Drawn Boy, London (2026)

03/08/2023

A wounded man from Cougnac Cave...

Inside of a Woolly Mammoth and surrounded by fingerprint marks

I believe it has the same number of spears/lines as the wounded man from Pech Merle cave, which isn't too far away, so you'd imagine it's related in some way.

A story perhaps? Or an event that happened? No one knows

The head is intriguing. And the position of the body...why did someone choose for it to look like this?

If someone held a gun to my head and said 'You must wildly speculate what this is', I would say:

1. It's an oral story painted down
2. It's an event that happened to someone around the time the drawings were made
3. (my most outlandish thought) - A Neanderthal killed by homo sapiens (although not sure the dates align on this)

As ever, no one knows. But, always fun to wonder

02/08/2023

Check this out - Genevieve von Petzinger documented the most widely used signs of Ice Age Europe

80% of all cave paintings are geometric signs NOT paintings of animals and people (there's hardly any paintings of people anyway)

Genevieve's book - The First Signs is around whether or not these geometric signs form some kind of message.

(Bennett Bacon proposes some dots/lines and Y shapes show mating and birthing times attached to some cave art of animals: https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/could-these-cave-markings-be-the-earliest-form-of-writing-180981403/)

What I find really interesting is whether Neanderthals were conveying messages in the geometric images they left.

The Neanderthal cave paintings can be very elaborate, and in some ways are similar to the later signs left by humans (that we know of).

I'm also interested in the colours used - Ochre seems to be used at earlier periods and manganese and charcoal later - would love to know more about this.

01/08/2023

Aging of cave paintings...

Did you know very few cave paintings can be directly aged?

It's because Manganese and Ochre can't be used to determine the age of paintings...only charcoal.

So when charcoal isn't used on the cave paintings, several assumptions are used to age the un-age-able

1. The age of stuff in the cave - Charcoal on the cave floor. Deer antlers. Artefacts associated with cave paintings that could be used

2. The 'style' of the painting. Looking at other cave paintings that have similar styles that have been directly aged, they will age the 'non age-able' paintings to a similar time. Or looking at the type of animals shown and knowing the time periods those animals were around for

3. Using things like the mineral deposits under and over a cave painting to know it was painted somewhere before and after, and the time cave entrances were known to have collapsed

All seems reasonable?

Well, you then have a swerve ball like Chauvet Cave

Stylistically, experts aged it between roughly 10,000 - 23,000 years old

Hundreds of samples of radiocarbon dating at Chauvet have shown most of the paintings are actually aged between 37,000 and 29,000 years old

A greater period of time than thinking someone in 2023 designed and built the Great Pyramid of Cheops! 😁

31/07/2023

The Wounded Man of Pech Merle.

Why do we think it's a human? There's very few knees in the animal kingdom that bend in the way the image shows. Plus the image has legs, arms and humanlike proportions.

There are 7 spears/lines going into the body. Is that overkill, or something else entirely?

This is what I love about prehistoric cave paintings - no one understands what, why (and often when) these images were made...

- What's with the strange face?
- What is relationship with the image above it (an aviform)?
- Why are the images of humans rudimentary compared to the images of animals?
- Why are there so few images of people?

There's lot of ideas, but no one really knows the answers...but it's always fun to wonder

Currently thought to be circa 22,000 - 30,000 years old

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