Cro-Magnon
I was reading in this morning’s paper about the ancient ivory carving (a “venus”) that was found in the Hohle Fels cave in Germany recently and it took me back a few thousand years ago to a time when I wriggled on my belly deep into another cave outside Les Eysies in France.
View Larger MapI hate enclosed spaces, hot, humid, smelling small, but the idea of what I might see helped me overcome my claustrophobia. There they were, not the brilliant murals of the nearby Lascaux caverns (though there were some surprisingly intact pictures of horses near the entrance), but a tracery of scratches in the limestone.
In flashlight they first seemed meaningless, then suddenly, the perfect profile of an elk, so organic it could have been accidental, so exact it could not have been. What you always see are the contributions of hundreds of generations of artists, elbows pinned to their sides, their incising tools borrowing from the images left by their predecessors as they make once again a prayer for bounty.
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