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Did art peak 30,000 years ago? How cave paintings became my lockdown obsession

<span>Photograph: Patrick Aventurier/Getty Images</span>
Photograph: Patrick Aventurier/Getty Images

I was recently awoken in the night by lions, their eyes glaring in the dark from blunt rectangular faces as they stalked bison through an ancient, arid grassland. As I came to, however, I realised I was not about to be eaten alive. This was simply one of the perils of spending too much time looking at images of cave art on the web.

Cave artists could do it all. The faces of the animals they painted are exquisite portraits, while their bodies are rendered in perfect perspective. But wait – weren’t these supposed to be the great achievements of European art? After all, in his classic study The Story of Art, EH Gombrich tells how western art took off when the ancient Greeks learned how to show movement, that the perspective was discovered in 15th-century Europe, and that the communication of sensation rather than the seen was the gift of the impressionists. Gombrich had probably not seen much cave art. Lascaux, a series of caves in the French Dordogne, was a recent discovery when he published his book in 1950 – and Chauvet, also in France, wouldn’t be found until 1994.

“Since Lascaux,” Picasso is supposed to have said after he saw the famous ice age cave paintings in 1940, “we have invented nothing.” Sadly, the quote is hard to source. But he should have said it, because it fits the insight that pervades his work, with its appetite for influences from ancient Iberian statuettes to African masks. Namely, that art’s story is not a trajectory of ascent, but more of a looping spiral, constantly retracing its steps.

Reaching back in time … Caverne du Pont-d’Arc, a replica of Chauvet Cave in France.
Reaching back in time … Caverne du Pont-d’Arc, a replica of Chauvet Cave in France. Photograph: AFP/Getty Images

When the pandemic started, the Guardian switched its Masterclasses online and challenged me, one of its tutors, to come up with a theme. “OK,” I thought. “What about a virtual trip through the whole of art history?” But, like Picasso, I got stuck at the very beginning. And Picasso had a point: the more you look at images from the walls of Lascaux and Chauvet, the more you realise art really has invented nothing since those days at the end of the ice age.

It is hard to take in how comprehensively these ancient artists anticipated the future. It takes time to fully absorb this – say, a year in and occasionally out of lockdown. I’ve visited, in the flesh, some of the most spectacular caves: Cougnac, Pech Merle, Niaux. But, in the past 12 months, I have conducted an online odyssey into both the caves I’ve been to and those I’ll probably never see. (Chauvet and Lascaux are permanently closed while others can be reached only by experienced divers.) In that time, I have come to fully appreciate the stunning nature of this primordial creativity.

Cave art makes art history pretty much obsolete. That tale of upward ascent – of European masters gradually mastering reality, from the Parthenon frieze to the eyes of Rembrandt – is simply not true. It turns out that perspective, shading, movement and expressiveness are not, after all, hard-won western discoveries. Rather, they are part of the toolkit of the human mind.

Archaeologist Henri Breuil, third from left at back, in Lascaux cave in 1948.
Archaeologist Henri Breuil, third from left at back, in Lascaux cave in 1948. Photograph: AFP/Getty Images

How does ice age art reveal this? We – homo sapiens – evolved in Africa no more than 300,000 years ago. There is evidence of art, potentially even paintings, in South Africa up to 100,000 years ago. Then, 30,000 years ago, a stunningly accomplished artistic culture exploded on to the scene, at least according to what we have been able to find. This took place in the most recent of Earth’s ice ages, a time when Europe was anything but hospitable. Yet cave art shows why humans migrated there: to hunt mammoth, rhinoceros, hippopotamus and deer. The tradition of cave painting continued up to the end of that ice age, about 10,000 years ago.

To get this in perspective, the Great Pyramid at Giza dates from 4,600 years ago; the Parthenon sculptures from 2,650 years ago; the plaques from the Oba’s palace in Benin from up to 600 years ago; Hokusai’s Great Wave from two centuries ago. Cave art exists on a different time scale – so different that art historians tend to discount it, leaving its significance to evolutionary scientists. They’re wrong. For this art contains the key to a more human and complete story of art.

If ice age people who hunted and foraged and had no concept of literacy could draw and paint like Leonardo da Vinci, that leaves the narrative of art as an ascent towards noting but perfection. In fact, ice age artists had a lot in common with the Renaissance genius. For one thing, they shared an obsession with depicting animals. The joy of exploring cave art in lockdown, online and in books, was to see all these creatures closely: lions stalking bison, an engraving of an owl, a relief of a pike, a painting of a duck on a pole. One of my favourites is a charcoal drawing of a flatfish, about 1.5 metres long, in La Pileta cave in Andalusia. You can see its curious turned-over face, that touching evolutionary evidence that plaice and sole adapted from vertically swimming fish, flipping over their bodies to live on the seabed.

La Pileta cave in Andalusia.
La Pileta cave in Andalusia. Photograph: Heritage Image Partnership Ltd/Alamy

So here is a recently evolved homo sapiens depicting a strikingly evolved fellow animal. That’s what makes cave art so entrancing: it records the moment consciousness makes an entrance. Before 33,000 years ago, all our evidence of the natural world comes from fossils, which reveal the story of life from single-celled creatures to dinosaurs to mammals. Then suddenly humans appear – and they are doing portraits. As a consequence, the extinct animals of the ice age don’t only exist as fossils, or frozen remains from Siberia. They also live in art.

If depiction is not a slowly accumulated skill, built up by western artists over the centuries, but rather something that came naturally to the first humans, then art’s history cannot be a progress or ascent. Instead, it is story of choices. And a lot of those have to do with identity. Egyptian art, Aztec art and the sculptures of Easter Island all show strong powers of observation, but choose to embed that eye for reality within a formalised “style”.

Style exists to define – from the national to the religious, right down to the level of personal identity. We’re ancient Egyptians and we walk sideways with our faces turned – got a problem with that? Cave art has stylistic traits, too. Hand prints keep recurring, along with red dots and geometrical patterns. As well as pointing to all the ways later humans would use abstract symbols to define themselves, they look forward to modern art.

Niaux cave in France.
Unforgettable … Niaux cave in France. Photograph: Tuul & Bruno Morandi/Getty Images

While my virtual cave art journey was fun, the real thing is unforgettable. A few years ago, my family and I visited Niaux, a painted cave in the Pyrenees. Niaux has a spectacular location, overlooking a mountain valley. The people who created the art it contains lived on the far side of the valley. They must have seen Niaux, across the divide, as a special place, akin to a temple or cathedral. Its imposing natural entrance, a soaring arch of overhanging stone, adds to its sacred aura.

To get to the art, you have to walk through long, sometimes narrow passages, lit only by your own helmet lamp. The artists of Niaux, we can deduce, did not intend the experience of seeing their art to be easy. After these passageways, you suddenly emerge into a grand, scary chamber, now called the Salon Noir. There on its walls are bison drawn in black charcoal – but with humanoid faces. They are mythic beasts, the ancestors of Picasso’s Minotaur.

When we emerged from the cave, our taxi hadn’t turned up. The site was closing and our phones weren’t working. But we weren’t worried. Maybe, echoing one theory about cave artists, we were high on oxygen deprivation. Or maybe this was one art pilgrimage that was worth getting stuck up a mountain for.

Across the planet, across the centuries, there are infinite varieties of art to look at and marvel over. But there is nothing better than this. That is why, with all the choice made possible online, I am continually drawn back to the cave.

A Brief History of Art with Jonathan Jones, Guardian Masterclasses, 5 May.