Chauvet Cave Paintings

Discovery and Conservation:

Chauvet Cave, near Vallon-Pont-d'Arc in France, was discovered quite by chance in the Ardeche Gorge in 1994, with three speleologists - Jean-Marie Chauvet, Eliette Brunel-Deschamps and Christian HILLAIRE - while they were surveying the second cave nearby. Inside the Chauvet cave, the trio took a huge network of galleries and rooms, about 400 meters in length if the floor was filled with palaeontological remains, including skulls of bears, two wolves. Some of these bones were arranged in a special position as the former human inhabitants. Incredibly, the entire maze remained untouched and undisturbed since Paleolithic times, because of a landslide that had blocked the entrance. 

Dates of cave paintings at Chauvet: 

Chauvet is one of the few prehistoric painted caves, which are preserved and intact, right down to the tracks of animals and humans. As a result ranks with Lascaux, Altamira, Pech-Merle and Cosquer as one of the main areas of prehistoric cave paintings. Furthermore, carbon was the earliest rock paintings dated to 30,000 BC, making them the oldest cave paintings in the world. Even Chauvet not boast the type of polychrome painting exemplified by the likes of Lascaux or Altamira, this is more than outweighed by the great originality, diversity and quality of his art. According to the French culture ministry in Paris, the antiquity of Chauvet's rock painting has radically changed the previous theories about the artistic development of Paleolithic Man, and demonstrate that Homo sapiens has taught drawing at a very early stage. 

Archeology and human habitation: 

The holes in the Ardeche contains many caves, much archaeological and geological significance. But the Chauvet Cave is unusually large and was inhabited by prehistoric humans in two different periods: the Aurignacian (32,000-24,000 BCE) and dug Tian (26,000-20,000 BCE). Most of the artwork dates to the earlier, Aurignacian, period (30,000 to 32,000 years ago), although people back briefly over the grave Tian times, and since then the cave has remained untouched. 

The Cave Art of Chauvet: 

Chauvet contains a total of over 300 paintings and engravings. These were combined in certain ways. In one of the two major parts of the cave, red most of the images, with a few black or bury them. In the second part, the animals are mostly black, with far fewer plugs and red numbers. There are also specific groups of animals: for example Horse Panel and the Panel of Lions and rhinos. 

Animal Talk: 

The most significant animals in the cave (which accounts for about 60 percent of all such images) are lions, mammoths and rhinos, all of which were rarely hunted, which in contrast to most other caves, Chauvet is not a graphical presentation of daily Stone Age life. Other rare animals include a panther, a leopard and a spotted owl. Moreover, the cave features the usual horses, bison, aurochs, Ibex, reindeer, red deer and musk oxen. 

Abstract art: 

As well as figurative images, Chauvet contains a wealth of abstract geometric symbols (though less than elsewhere in the region of Cantabria, Spain), a series of indecipherable marks, and a quantity of red ocher hand stencils and hand prints. 

Painting skills and techniques: 

According to leading paleoanthropologists treat Chauvet prehistoric artists excellent. Shadow, perspective and relief is skilfully used, the body proportions of the animals is natural, and the species is clearly defined, with many details about the anatomy shown: for example, mammoths are drawn with a curved belly, bison presented in front with a bushy mane even horses have thick manes, while the rhinos have very distinctive ears. 

The purpose of Chauvet: 

Paleolithic experts still do not understand the purpose or functionality of prehistoric parietal art. One of the more common theories - based on the theme of the murals, and the fact that Chauvet, like many caves were not used as a place of regular habitation - is that it functioned as a center for ritual or magical ceremony. Chauvet contains the earliest history of art, but it makes the house earliest cave murals and an example of the growing cultural level of man in the last period of the Stone Age.