The Incredible Prehistoric Cave Paintings of Northern Spain

It was thrilling to see the paintings in Tito Bustillo Cave.

NOTE: This part of the blog is not chronological. We visited four caves in Spain--one a reproduction of Altamira and the original caves of Tito Bustillo, El Castillo, and Las Monedas. It just seemed more logical to discuss all the cave visits at once. It is forbidden to take photographs in the caves, so the photos are taken from museum displays and books. The exception are the photos taken in the Altamira reproduction.

In 1875, Marcelino Sanz de Sautuola, who had a background in science, went to Altamira cave to do some excavations. The cave had been discovered in 1868, but had not yet been fully explored. Accompanying Sautuola was his eight-year old daughter, Maria. With the lantern light illuminating the inside of the cave, Maria raised her head. "Look, Papa," she said, "oxen." But the figures on the cave ceiling were not oxen. They were aurochs, a long extinct cattle breed.

It took years for science to confirm that those paintings were, in fact, thousands of years old, as further ancient cave art was discovered in Europe and dating techniques advanced.

I've been fascinated by ancient cave art for a long time. In the 1990s, Kevin gave me a richly produced coffee-table book with the stunning last photographs taken of the artworks in Lascaux Cave in France. Lascaux, like Altamira in Spain, is now permanently closed to preserve the art, because even the breath of visitors, with exhaled carbon dioxide, can damage the paintings.

In 2014, we visited the Lascaux reproduction cave and the original caves of Font de Gaume and Pech Merle in France. The reproduced cave paintings were interesting, since the 20th Century artists precisely duplicated the ancient artworks, using the same pigments and techniques of the originals. But nothing compares to seeing the real cave paintings. Viewing the handprints of a woman from more than 20,000 years ago sent chills down my spine. I felt a connection that I can't quite describe. (And yes, the vast majority of handprints in those caves are female.) 

I definitely felt an emotional connection once more, when we entered the Tito Bustillo Cave in Ribadesella, Spain. That cave was found in 1968 by a group of teenage boys, who later brought their cave-exploring group to examine it further. That was when they discovered the amazing paintings there. In a video at the cave museum, one woman recalled how the group of teens lay down on the cave floor, using their flash lights to observe the art. They were mesmerized. "I'm not sure how long we stayed like that," she said. "We were lost in time."

I understood that statement. When we visited Tito Bustillo, our tour guide, speaking only in Spanish, led our group of 15 people or so deeper and deeper into the pitch-dark cave, with only a few low lamps casting a slight glow. Huge stalactites dripped water down upon us from the cave ceiling, as the path wound its way over the slippery cave floor, past limestone-encrusted stalagmites emerging from the base. Then, the guide turned his flashlight onto a wall, and I gasped. (Kevin says I squealed!) I couldn't help it. There was the image of the horse that is Tito Bustillo's symbol. It is young--only about 10,000 years old! The oldest paintings in the cave are more than 30,000 years old.

Some of the art in the caves are mere etchings. Some have a charcoal base. And others have ochre-based pigments, which were deliberately mixed. Often, the artists used bulges, contours, or lines in the caves themselves to create a three-dimensional look. The reproduction of Altamira especially demonstrated how bulges were used to emphasize the bulk of sleeping bison.

While some of the paintings are rough, others are highly stylized and beautiful. Surprisingly, the artists in each generation often painted over the older artwork. (Imagine if we today, were to paint over Michaelangelo's Sistine Chapel?! No one knows why they did that.)  It sometimes requires a guide to point out the lines of that depict a particular animal. There are also graphic symbols. (I haven't depicted the red dots, which are frequently found in the caves, sometimes close to animal depictions and sometimes just lines that extend, as though they are directions.)

Genevieve von Petzinger, a paleoanthropolgist from the University of Victoria in B. C., studies those graphics, which are not yet writing. But those symbols, perhaps the first that homo sapiens used, may have eventually evolved into writing. Our ancestors, living in small groups, may not have needed writing, von Petzinger says. They could simply gather the group together and speak with them. (Von Petzinger has TED talks and other videos on YouTube that discuss the 32 symbols she has found that appear to have been used over and over again for thousands of years.)

The mysteries of the artwork is partly what enchants me. There are several theories about why the cave peoples created the art. A while ago, it was posited that the animals were depicted as a kind of magic to aid in hunting, but many of the animals they painted were not those they typically hunted. While people lived in some of the caves, they didn't in others, and where they lived were not in the areas that were painted. Some of the paintings would have been difficult to access even thousands of years ago, and it is believed  that the artists would have had to construct scaffolding of some sort to paint them.

It is thought that the painted areas must have been sacred. In Pech Merle in France, there are footprints of young people preserved in the cave mud, who perhaps were there for a coming-of-age ritual. Because most of the handprints are female, I wonder if the artists were also female priests? Many primitive societies worshipped the Mother Goddess, and what is more like the womb than a cave? (That's just my supposition.)

What absolutely stuns me is that these people, whom we think of as primitive because their technology was not well developed, actually had a highly structured culture. Although the figures and the symbols change somewhat with time, within Northern Spain and Southern France they nonetheless used the same places to paint over multiple generations. And they did this for thousands of years! To have a culture that existed for 10,000 years or more is really hard to get one's mind around.

I don't usually edit my posts, unless I find mistakes, but maybe someday I will re-visit this post, because it seems so inadequate. I wish I could better communicate why these mysterious paintings affect me so deeply. In the meantime, I thank Kevin for indulging my desire to see the caves in person.