A Treasure from the Ice Age

A new exhibit shows the skills of Cro-Magnon man

It was a startlingly different world. Vast areas of the Northern Hemisphere were covered with ice. Across the ice-free parts of Europe and Asia, consisting largely of tundra and great treeless steppes, herds of mammoths, bison, reindeer and horses freely roamed. For long periods, winters were cruelly cold, and even in summertime the average temperature was 12DEG to 15DEG C (54DEG to 59DEG F.). Still, under these difficult conditions, during a period of 25,000 years before the dawn of civilization, the Ice Age Cro-Magnon people not only thrived, but created a surprisingly sophisticated culture that totally belies the popular image of them as savage, club-swinging brutes.

Nowhere is this cultural richness more apparent than in the artworks that these paleolithic hunters left in caves in France and Spain. When the first of these subterranean galleries was discovered in Spain nearly a century ago, Europe's savants, still reeling from the shock of Darwinian evolution, refused to believe that the find was anything more than a hoax. Since then, nearly a hundred richly decorated prehistoric caves have been found in Spain and France, and the existence of paleolithic painting has been established beyond doubt. The ancient artisans also left behind tiny sculptures of exquisite beauty, meticulous carvings on mammoth bone, and other stunning objects. Like the tableaux on the cave walls, some portray paleolithic man's animal neighbors. Others, often rendered in an almost contemporary style, show the Cro-Magnon people themselves.

Despite the abundance of these ancient works, the contemporary world has seen little of them. Many of the originals are carefully locked away in the vaults of various European cities, and some have never been publicly displayed. Nor are the caverns always accessible. France's celebrated Lascaux cave with its paintings of running bison and horses is now closed to all but a few selected scholars; contamination and changes in humidity and temperature caused by sightseers in the few decades after the cave was discovered in 1940 caused more damage to the fragile paintings than had occurred during the previous 16,000 years.

Now, at long last, a collection of 250 of the world's oldest known works of art is on display at Manhattan's American Museum of Natural History, in an exhibition called "Ice Age Art." A few, like the carved stone amulet of a female pregnant on one side but not on the other, are priceless originals.

Most of the others are skillfully rendered copies in realistic settings. Captured on film by Frenchman Jean Vertut, who specializes in photographing cave art, a Lascaux mural of horses, bulls and stags covers an entire wall of the show. Designer Henry Gardiner's theatrical lighting suggests the flickering oil lamps by which the cave artists must have worked. The exhibit also includes elegant silk-screen reproductions crafted by Douglas Mazonowicz, an artist and writer who has studied rock art around the world. Perhaps most impressive of all are the full-size replicas of Cro-Magnon man's sculptures. Some are so meticulously copied that even the exhibit's sharp-eyed curator, Alexander Marshack, has difficulty telling reproduction from real.

The dazzling collection includes, for example, a tiny, 6.4-cm-long (2 1/2 in.) curving sculpture of a horse carved out of a mammoth tusk; it hardly seems possible that this graceful piece, fashioned more than 30,000 years ago, is one of the oldest objets d'art ever found. No less remarkable are the voluptuous "Venus" statuettes, some of them coiffed in Stone Age chic, that date back some 27,000 years. Even the wall paintings, some of them on a larger-than-life scale, show a mastery of form and perspective that was not seen again for almost 6,000 years.

These magnificent works reflect far more about Cro-Magnon man than his artistic ability. Indistinguishable from modern man either in brain capacity or physical appearance, he was clearly using his artistic skills to embellish a culture of a richness and complexity that is only beginning to be plumbed by scholars.

What that culture was like remains an enigma. What, for instance, is the significance of the Venus figures, with their exaggerated sexual features? What role did the great cave paintings play in the lives of those ancient people? Whatever the answers, it is clear the art is exceptionally complex, more than simple "hunting magic," as some turn-of-the-century scholars thought. Every indication is that Cro-Magnon man was deeply involved in rituals, ceremonies, myths, perhaps even a kind of religion.

Marshack, a former science writer who has devoted 15 years to paleolithic studies, has suggested even bolder ideas. In his writings, notably The Roots of Civilization, he says that what looks like random scribbling on cave walls and even on some artifacts may actually represent many different symbol systems. These could have been used to record the passage of the seasons and astronomical observations and to indicate periods of rituals and ceremonies. If these controversial yet hardly dismissable ideas are correct, Cro-Magnon man may well have been experimenting with the precursors of writing, arithmetic, calendar making and other "civilized" skills.

Marshack asks the key question: "Did these traditions prepare the way for the artistic and symbolic traditions of the civilizations that began to develop not long after the ice melted, about 10,000 B.C.?" No one can say for sure whether paleolithic man did in fact light that intellectual spark. But it is undeniable, as Marshack notes, that the complex art comes from "persons like us, with our brains and our capacity, and that no visitors from space were required to teach them."

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