The Cave and the Cathedral

Amir D. Aczel

Description

What Are The Ancients Trying To Tell Us?

"Why would the Cro-Magnon hunter-gatherers of Europe expend so much time and effort to penetrate into deep, dark, and dangerous caverns, where they might encounter cave bears and lions or get lost and die, aided only by the dim glow of animal fat–burning stone candles, often crawling on all fours for distances of up to a mile or more underground . . . to paint amazing, haunting images of animals?"
—From The Cave and the Cathedral

Join researcher and scientist Amir D. Aczel on a time-traveling journey through the past and discover what the ancient caves of France and Spain may reveal about the origin of language, art, and human thought as he illuminates one of the greatest mysteries in anthropology.

"A well-researched and highly readable exploration of one of the most spectacular manifestations of the unique human creative spirit–and one of its most intriguing mysteries."
—Ian Tattersall, Curator, Division of Anthropology, American Museum of Natural History, and author of The Fossil Trail: How We Know What We Think We Know about Human Evolution
Preface.

Acknowledgments.

1. The Adventure of Niaux.

2. The Greatest Mystery.

3. The Neanderthal Enigma.

4. The Roots of Language.

5. Abbé Breuil.

6. Font-de-Gaume and Combarelles.

7. The Tale of a Missing Dog.

8. The Sign of the Bull and the Legend of the Minotaur.

9. Rouffignac and Pech Merle.

10. The Discovery of Lascaux.

11. The Enigma of the Pit.

12. The Groundbreaking Work of Annette Laming-Emperaire.

13. Prehistoric Objets d'Art.

14. The Sign of the Hand.

15. The Legend of the White Lady.

16. Shamans of the Tundra.

17. Stonehenge and Signs in the Sky.

18. The Mediterranean, Australia, and Patagonia.

19. Leroi-Gourhan's Theory.

20. The Relationship between Signs and Animals.

21. The Chauvet Cave.

Notes.

References.

Illustration Credits.

Index.

Sujets

• Social Science
• Sociologie, société et politique
• Amir Aczel
• Paleolithic
• Anthropology
• Social
• Culture

Informations

• Publié par: Turner Publishing Company
• Date de parution: 12 février 2010
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9780470638118
• Langue: English

Extrait

Table of Contents
 
Books by Amir Aczel
Title Page
Copyright Page
Dedication
Preface
Acknowledgements
 
Chapter 1 - The Adventure of Niaux
Chapter 2 - The Greatest Mystery
Chapter 3 - The Neanderthal Enigma
Chapter 4 - The Roots of Language
Chapter 5 - Abbé Breuil
Chapter 6 - Font-de-Gaume and Combarelles
Chapter 7 - The Tale of a Missing Dog
Chapter 8 - The Sign of the Bull and the Legend of the Minotaur
Chapter 9 - Rouffignac and Pech Merle
Chapter 10 - The Discovery of Lascaux
Chapter 11 - The Enigma of the Pit
Chapter 12 - The Groundbreaking Work of Annette Laming-Emperaire
Chapter 13 - Prehistoric Objets d’Art
Chapter 14 - The Sign of the Hand
Chapter 15 - The Legend of the White Lady
Chapter 16 - Shamans of the Tundra
Chapter 17 - Stonehenge and Signs in the Sky
Chapter 18 - The Mediterranean, Australia, and Patagonia
Chapter 19 - Leroi-Gourhan’s Theory
Chapter 20 - The Relationship between Signs and Animals
Chapter 21 - The Chauvet Cave
 
Notes
References
Illustration Credits
Index
Books by Amir Aczel
The Jesuit and the Skull: Teilhard de Chardin, Evolution, and the Search of Peking Man
 
The Artist nd the Mathematician: The Story of Nicola Bourbaki, the Genius Mathematician Who Never Existed
 
Descartes’s Secret Notebook: A True Tale of Mathematics, Mysticism, and the Quest to Understand the Universe
 
Chance: A Guide to Gambling, Love, the Stock Market, and Just About Everything Else
 
Entanglement: The Greatest Mystery in Physics
 
Pendulum: Leon Foucault and the Triumph of Science
 
The Riddle of the Compass: The Invention That Changed the World
 
The Mystery of the Aleph: Mathematics, the Kabbalah, and the Search for Infinity
 
God’s Equation: Einstein, Relativity, and the Expanding Universe
 
Fermat’s Last Theorem: Unlocking the Secret of an Ancient Mathematical Problem

This book is printed on acid-free paper.

  Copyright © 2009 by Amir D. Aczel. All rights reserved
 
Published by John Wiley & Sons, Inc., Hoboken, New Jersey
Published simultaneously in Canada
 
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data:
Aczel, Amir D.
The cave and the cathedral: how a real-life Indiana Jones and a renegade scholar decoded the ancient art of man / Amir D. Aczel.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
eISBN : 978-0-470-63811-8
1. Paleolithic period. 2. Magdalenian culture. 3. Cave paintings.
4. Painting, Prehistoric 5. Niaux Cave (France) 6. Lascaux Cave (France)
7. Chauvet Cave (France) 8. Antiquities, Prehistoric. I. Title.
GN771.A28 2009
930.1-dc22 2009006816
2009006816
 

 
To Miriam, who ventured into the depths of Combarelles
Preface
 
 
 
 
One of the greatest mysteries of the human experience on Earth—if not the greatest mystery of all—is the appearance, around 32,000 years ago, of magnificent paintings, drawings, and engravings of animals inside deep and often almost inaccessible recesses of large Ice Age caverns in France and Spain (and a small number of cases in southern Italy). The art seems to have followed very specific norms: It almost exclusively featured animals; there were only a few humanlike figures, never portrayed in as much detail as the animals. There was absolutely no terrain—no trees, no rivers, no mountains, no ground whatsoever; the animals appear to be floating in space, and their images often overlap.
Stunningly, this specific practice had remained perfectly unchanged for 20,000 years—from 32,000 years ago until around 12,000 years ago; the art found in all of the decorated caves followed this exact format. Then, around 11,500 years ago, the fecund artistic activity in deep caves inexplicably came to an abrupt end. The mystery of cave art is the question “Why?”
Why would the Cro-Magnon hunter-gatherers of Europe expend so much time, effort, and resources to penetrate into deep, dark, and dangerous caverns, where they might encounter cave bears and lions or get lost and die? Why would they often crawl on all fours for distances of up to a mile or more underground, over mud and sharp stones, through narrow jagged fissures in the stony entrails of caves, aided only by the dim glow of animal-fat-burning stone candles, to paint amazing, haunting images of animals?
The discovery of the first decorated caves in the 1870s shocked the world. Attempts to solve the mystery of the purpose, the meaning, and perhaps the hidden symbolism of Upper Paleolithic cave art in Europe began after the first decorated caves were discovered in the late nineteenth century—but these attempts were made only when people became convinced that the art was authentic. (The Paleolithic is the “Old Stone Age,” lasting from about 2.5 million years ago, roughly when stone tools appear—although some are even earlier than those and were made by early hominids—to about 11,000 years ago. The latter part, from 45,000 to 11,000 years ago is called the Upper Paleolithic, a period from 45,000 to around 11,000 years ago. Then comes a short intermediate period called the Mesolithic, and it is followed by the Neolithic, or the “New Stone Age.”) For a long time, they assumed that it had been produced by modern-day artists, perhaps as forgeries made to appear ancient.
The first explanations of cave art were logical deductions people made by extrapolating from beliefs and practices of present-day hunter-gatherer societies, such as the magic of the hunt, shamanism, and “sympathetic magic,” or drawing animals as a way to induce them to be captured. These early hypotheses were prompted by observations of modern-day hunter-gatherer societies in Africa, Australia, and the Arctic and were supported by the finding that some of the animals depicted in caves (although not many) appeared to be wounded. In addition, in very few cases, the humanlike beings drawn in caves appeared to be wearing animal masks or to have features with animal characteristics, and this reminded scholars of the shamanistic practices of some modern-day societies.
Yet it soon became clear that there must have been some mysterious and much deeper reason for the art, because the animals most often depicted in caves were not the most frequently consumed game. And the art was accompanied by strange, undecipherable signs, whose meaning was assumed to have something to do with the purpose behind this whole enterprise. Scientists were baffled; many proposed theories to explain the phenomenon, but all of these attempted explanations were found to have limitations.
Then an intellectual giant of prehistoric studies, the French scholar André Leroi-Gourhan, developed a bold theory—one that went far beyond simple implications based on a comparison with modern-day societies.

I became captivated with European cave art when I visited my first cavern: the famous cave of Niaux in the French Pyrenees a few years ago. Thereafter, I pursued an extensive effort aimed at solving the mysteries of this ancient artistic activity. After years of research and visits to most Paleolithic caves that are still open to the public, I became convinced of the power and depth of Leroi-Gourhan’s remarkable theory, even though his writings on cave art have been criticized by some who came after him.
But later is not always better. I believe that this French expert, who wrote in the 1950s, had it right, whereas those who came after him got it wrong. It’s unusual in science that a later theory should be seen as less correct than an earlier one; what is new usually supersedes the old way of thinking. But in the case of European Paleolithic cave art, I believe that what happened here bucks the trend, thus making it an even more interesting story.
This book explores the deep mystery of Paleolithic cave art—perhaps the greatest of all mysteries of our ancient past, because it can potentially tell us something meaningful about where we came from and who we are and perhaps e