Common Ground

by Rob Cowen

Some years ago, by an arc of stone and another river, I stood outside the sealed entrance to the Chauvet cave, halfway up a cliff face in the Ardèche Gorges. Lost for millennia but rediscovered in the 1960s, it was found to contain over 400 representations dating from between 15,000 and 30,000 years ago. The mind can struggle to take in that reach of time, especially when you consider the pyramids are ‘only’ 5,000 years old. The handprints and multiple forms painted, scratched and worked within show the land outside the walls as it once was. Life, as it once was. To enter it now you need written permission from the French interior minister but its secrets can be seen and studied in the masses of high-definition photographs, film footage, interactive websites, even a full-scale, life-size and painstakingly accurate reproduction of large sections of the cave being built in a hangar nearby. Beasts massing to cross the river are represented on a section where the buttery flank of wall narrows, giving the same sense of compressing, jostling and funnelling you see with animals congregating at a water’s edge. Astoundingly beautifully rendered aurochs and rhinoceros dissolve into one another; lifelike horse heads merge perspectives. Owls, bears and panthers emerge and change shape in what is a dark, frightening and fascinating world. There are strange human forms too, all of which seem at a point of transformation. On one piece of rock is a half-human, half-animal couple: the man ...

Cave art