Rock paintings of the land of Gaya. Petroglyphs in Europe

A person's desire to capture the world, events that inspire fear, hope to be successful in hunting, life, struggle with other tribes, nature, demonstrated in drawings. They are found all over the world from South America to Siberia. The rock art of primitive people is also called cave art, since mountain, underground shelters were often used by them as shelters, reliably sheltering them from bad weather and predators. In Russia they are called “pisanitsa”. The scientific name of the drawings is petroglyphs. After discovery, scientists sometimes paint them over for better visibility and preservation.

Rock Art Themes

Drawings carved on the walls of caves, open, vertical surfaces of rocks, free-standing stones, drawn with coal from a fire, chalk, mineral or plant substances, essentially represent objects of art - engravings, paintings of ancient people. They usually depict:

1. Figures of large animals (mammoths, elephants, bulls, deer, bison), birds, fish, which were coveted prey, as well as dangerous predators– bears, lions, wolves, crocodiles.
2. Scenes of hunting, dancing, sacrifices, war, boating, fishing.
3. Images of pregnant women, leaders, shamans in ritual clothing, spirits, deities, and other mythical creatures, sometimes attributed by sensationalists to aliens.

These paintings have given scientists a lot to understand the history of the development of society, the animal world, and changes in the Earth’s climate over thousands of years, because the early petroglyphs date back to the late Paleolithic and Neolithic eras, and the later ones to the Bronze Age. For example, this is how the periods of domestication of the buffalo, wild bull, horse, and camel in the history of the use of animals by humans were determined. Unexpected discoveries included confirmation of the existence of bison in Spain, woolly rhinoceroses in Siberia, and prehistoric animals on the great plain, which today represents a huge desert - the Central Sahara.

History of discovery

This discovery is often attributed to the Spanish amateur archaeologist Marcelino de Sautuole, who found magnificent drawings in the Altamira cave in his homeland at the end of the 19th century. There, the rock paintings, made with charcoal and ocher, available to primitive people, were so good that they were long considered a fake and a hoax.

In fact, by that time such drawings had long been known throughout the world, with the exception of Antarctica. Thus, rock paintings along the banks of the rivers of Siberia and the Far East have been known since the 17th century and were described by famous travelers: scientists Spafariy, Stallenberg, Miller. Therefore, the discovery in the Altamira cave and the subsequent hype is just an example of successful, albeit unintentional, propaganda in the scientific world.

Famous drawings

Art galleries, “photo exhibitions” of ancient people, amazing with their plot, variety, and quality of detail:

1. Magura Cave (Bulgaria). Animals, hunters, ritual dances are depicted.
2. Cueva de las Manos (Argentina). The “Cave of Hands” depicts the left hands of the ancient inhabitants of this place, hunting scenes, painted in red, white and black.
3. Bhimbetka (India). People, horses, crocodiles, tigers and lions “mixed” here.
4. Serra da Capivara (Brazil). Many caves depict hunting and scenes of rituals. The oldest drawings are at least 25 thousand years old.
5. Laas Gaal (Somalia) – cows, dogs, giraffes, people in ceremonial clothes.
6. Chauvet Cave (France). Opened in 1994. The age of some of the drawings, including mammoths, lions, and rhinoceroses, is about 32 thousand years.
7. Kakadu National Park (Australia) with images made by the ancient Aborigines of the mainland.
8. Newspaper Rock (USA, Utah). Native American heritage, with an unusually high concentration of paintings on a flat rocky cliff.

Rock art in Russia has a geography ranging from White Sea to the banks of the Amur and Ussuri. Here are a few of them:

1. White Sea petroglyphs (Karelia). More than 2 thousand drawings - hunting, battles, ritual processions, people on skis.
2. Shishkinsky writings on rocks in the upper reaches of the Lena River (Irkutsk region). More than 3 thousand different drawings were described in the middle of the 20th century by Academician Okladnikov. A convenient path leads to them. Although climbing there is prohibited, this does not stop those who want to see the drawings up close.
3. Petroglyphs of Sikachi-Alyan (Khabarovsk Territory). At this place there was an ancient camp of the Nanais. The drawings show scenes of fishing, hunting, and shamanic masks.

It must be said that the rock paintings of primitive people different places differs significantly in preservation, plot scenes, and quality of execution by ancient authors. But to see them at least, and if you’re lucky in reality, is like looking into the distant past.

The cave was discovered on December 18, 1994 in the south of France, in the Ardèche department, on the steep bank of the canyon of the river of the same name, a tributary of the Rhone, near the town of Pont d'Arc by three speleologists Jean-Marie Chauvet, Elette Brunel Deschamps and Christian Hillaire.

All of them already had extensive experience in exploring caves, including those containing traces of prehistoric man. The half-buried entrance to the then unnamed cave was already known to them, but the cave had not yet been explored. When Elette, squeezing through the narrow opening, saw a large cavity going into the distance, she realized that she needed to return to the car for the stairs. It was already evening, they even doubted whether they should postpone further examination, but nevertheless they returned behind the stairs and went down into the wide passage.

The researchers stumbled upon a cave gallery, where a flashlight beam snatched an ocher spot on the wall from the darkness. It turned out to be a “portrait” of a mammoth. No other cave in the south-east of France, rich in “paintings,” can compare with the newly discovered one, named after Chauvet, either in size, or in the preservation and skill of the drawings, and the age of some of them reaches 30-33 thousand years.

Speleologist Jean-Marie Chauvet, after whom the cave got its name.

The discovery of the Chauvet Cave on December 18, 1994 became a sensation, which not only pushed back the appearance of primitive drawings by 5 thousand years ago, but also overturned the concept of the evolution of Paleolithic art that had been established at that time, based, in particular, on the classification of the French scientist Henri Leroy-Gourhan . According to his theory (as well as the opinion of most other experts), the development of art went from primitive forms to more complex ones, and then the earliest drawings from Chauvet should generally belong to the pre-figurative stage (dots, spots, stripes, winding lines, other scribbles) . However, researchers of Chauvet's paintings found themselves face to face with the fact that the oldest images are almost the most perfect in their execution from the Paleolithic ones known to us (Paleolithic is at least: it is not known what Picasso, who admired the Altamiran bulls, would have said if he had had a chance to see the lions and Chauvet bears!). Apparently, art is not very friendly with evolutionary theory: avoiding any stadiality, it somehow inexplicably arises immediately, out of nothing, in highly artistic forms.

Here is what the largest expert in the field of Paleolithic art Z. A. Abramova writes about this: “Paleolithic art arises like a bright flash of flame in the depths of centuries. Having developed unusually quickly from the first timid steps to polychrome frescoes, this art just as abruptly disappeared. It is not finds itself a direct continuation in subsequent eras... It remains a mystery how the Paleolithic masters achieved such high perfection and what were the paths along which echoes of the art of the Ice Age penetrated into Picasso’s brilliant work" (quoted from: Sher Ya. When and how did art arise? ).

(source - Donsmaps.com)

The drawing of black rhinoceroses from Chauvet is considered to be the oldest in the world (32,410 ± 720 years ago; there is information on the Internet about a certain “new” dating, giving Chauvet’s painting from 33 to 38 thousand years old, but without credible references).

At the moment, this is the oldest example of human creativity, the beginning of art, unencumbered by history. Typically, Paleolithic art is dominated by drawings of animals that people hunted - horses, cows, deer, and so on. The walls of Chauvet are covered with images of predators - cave lions, panthers, owls and hyenas. There are drawings depicting rhinoceros, tarpans and a number of other animals of the Ice Age.

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In addition, no other cave contains so many images of a woolly rhinoceros, an animal whose “dimensions” and strength are not inferior to a mammoth. In size and strength, the woolly rhinoceros was almost equal to the mammoth, its weight reached 3 tons, body length - 3.5 m, the size of the front horn - 130 cm. The rhinoceros became extinct at the end of the Pleistocene, earlier than the mammoth and the cave bear. Unlike mammoths, rhinoceroses were not herd animals. Probably because this powerful animal, although it was a herbivore, had the same vicious disposition as their modern relatives. This is evidenced by scenes of fierce “rock” fights between rhinoceroses from Chauvet.

The cave is located in the south of France, on the steep bank of the canyon of the Ardège River, a tributary of the Rhone, in a very picturesque place, in the vicinity of the Pont d’Arc (“Arch Bridge”). This natural bridge is formed in the rock by a huge ravine up to 60 meters high.

The cave itself is "mothballed". Entrance to it is open exclusively to a limited circle of scientists. And even those are allowed to enter it only twice a year, in spring and autumn, and work there only for a couple of weeks, a few hours a day. Unlike Altamira and Lascaux, Chauvet has not yet been “cloned,” so ordinary people like you and me can only admire the reproductions, which we will certainly do, but a little later.

“In the fifteen years or more that have passed since the discovery, there have been many more people who have been to the summit of Everest than have seen these drawings,” writes Adam Smith in his review of documentary Werner Herzog on Chauvet. Haven't tested it, but sounds good.

So, the famous German film director somehow miraculously managed to get permission to film. The film "Cave of Forgotten Dreams" was shot in 3D and shown at the Berlin Film Festival in 2011, which, presumably, attracted the attention of the general public to Chauvet. It’s not good for us to lag behind the public either.

Researchers agree that the caves containing such a large number of drawings were clearly not intended for housing and did not represent prehistoric art galleries, but were sanctuaries, places for rituals, in particular, the initiation of young men entering adulthood (more on this evidenced, for example, by preserved children's footprints).

In the four “halls” of Chauvet, along with connecting passages with a total length of about 500 meters, more than three hundred perfectly preserved drawings depicting various animals, including large-scale multi-figure compositions, were discovered.

Elette Brunel Deschamps and Christian Hillaire - participants in the discovery of the Chauvet Cave.

The paintings also answered the question: did tigers or lions live in prehistoric Europe? It turned out to be the second. Ancient drawings of cave lions always show them without a mane, which suggests that, unlike their African or Indian relatives, they either did not have one, or it was not as impressive. Often these images show the characteristic tuft on the tail of lions. The coloring of the fur, apparently, was one color.

In Paleolithic art for the most part drawings of animals from the “menu” of primitive people appear - bulls, horses, deer (although this is not entirely accurate: it is known, for example, that for the inhabitants of Lascaux the main “food” animal was the reindeer, while on the walls of the cave it is found in single copies). In general, one way or another, commercial ungulates predominate. Chauvet is unique in this sense because of the abundance of images of predators - cave lions and bears, as well as rhinoceroses. It makes sense to dwell on the latter in more detail. Such a number of rhinoceroses as in Chauvet has never been found in any other cave.

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It is noteworthy that the first “artists” to leave their mark on the walls of some Paleolithic caves, including Chauvet, were... bears: in some places the engravings and paintings were applied directly on top of the traces of powerful claws, the so-called griffads.

In the late Pleistocene, at least two species of bears could coexist: brown bears survived safely to this day, and their relatives, cave bears (large and small) died out, unable to adapt to the damp gloom of caves. The big cave bear wasn't just big - it was huge. Its weight reached 800-900 kg, the diameter of the skulls found is about half a meter. A person most likely could not emerge victorious from a fight with such an animal in the depths of a cave, but some zoological experts are inclined to assume that, despite its terrifying size, this animal was slow, non-aggressive and did not pose a real danger.

An image of a cave bear made with red ocher in one of the first halls.

The oldest Russian paleozoologist, Professor N.K. Vereshchagin believes that “among Stone Age hunters, cave bears were a kind of meat cattle that did not require care for grazing and feeding.” The appearance of a cave bear is conveyed in Chauvet more clearly than anywhere else. It seems that it played a special role in the life of primitive communities: the beast was depicted on rocks and pebbles, its figurines were sculpted from clay, its teeth were used as pendants, the skin probably served as a bed, and the skull was preserved for ritual purposes. Thus, in Chauvet a similar skull was discovered resting on a rocky base, which most likely indicates the existence of a bear cult.

The woolly rhinoceros became extinct a little earlier than the mammoth (according to various sources from 15-20 to 10 thousand years ago), and, at least in the drawings of the Magdalenian period (15-10 thousand years BC), it is almost not meets. In Chauvet, we generally see a two-horned rhinoceros with larger horns, without any traces of fur. This may be the Merka rhinoceros, which lived in southern Europe, but is much rarer than its woolly relative. The length of its front horn could be up to 1.30 m. In short, it was a monster.

There are practically no images of people. Only chimera-like figures are found - for example, a man with the head of a bison. No traces of human habitation were found in the Chauvet Cave, but in some places the footprints of the cave's primitive visitors were preserved on the floor. According to researchers, the cave was a place for magical rituals.

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Previously, researchers believed that several stages could be distinguished in the development of primitive painting. At first the drawings were very primitive. The skill came later, with experience. More than one thousand years had to pass for the drawings on the walls of the caves to reach their perfection.

Chauvet's discovery shattered this theory. French archaeologist Jean Clotte, having carefully examined Chauvet, stated that our ancestors probably learned to draw even before moving to Europe. And they arrived here about 35,000 years ago. The most ancient images from the Chauvet cave are very perfect works of painting, in which you can see perspective, chiaroscuro, different angles, etc.

Interestingly, the artists of the Chauvet Cave used methods that were not applicable anywhere else. Before applying the design, the walls were scraped and leveled. Ancient artists first scratched the outlines of the animal and used paint to give them the necessary volume. “The people who painted this were great artists,” confirms French rock art specialist Jean Clotte.

A detailed study of the cave will take several decades. However, it is already clear that its total length is more than 500 m at one level, the ceiling height is from 15 to 30 m. There are four consecutive “halls” and numerous side branches. In the first two rooms, the images are made in red ocher. The third contains engravings and black figures. There are many bones of ancient animals in the cave, and in one of the halls there are traces of the cultural layer. About 300 images were found. The painting is perfectly preserved.

(source - Flickr.com)

There is an assumption that such images with multiple contours layered on top of each other are a kind of primitive animation. When a torch was quickly moved along the drawing in a cave immersed in darkness, the rhinoceros “came to life”, and one can imagine the effect this had on the cave “spectators” - “The Arrival of a Train” by the Lumiere brothers is resting.

There are other considerations in this regard. For example, that in this way a group of animals is depicted in perspective. Nevertheless, the same Herzog in his film adheres to “our” version, and he can be trusted in matters of “moving pictures”.

Chauvet Cave is currently closed to public access because any noticeable change in air humidity could damage the wall paintings. Only a few archaeologists can gain access, for only a few hours and subject to restrictions. The cave has been cut off from the outside world since the Ice Age due to the fall of a rock in front of its entrance.

The drawings of the Chauvet cave amaze with their knowledge of the laws of perspective (overlapping drawings of mammoths) and the ability to put shadows - until now it was believed that this technique was discovered several thousand years later. And an eternity before Seurat had the idea, primitive artists discovered pointillism: the image of one animal, it seems, a bison, consists entirely of red dots.

But the most surprising thing is that, as already mentioned, artists give preference to rhinoceroses, lions, cave bears and mammoths. Typically, the models for rock art were the animals that were hunted. “From the entire bestiary of that era, artists choose the most predatory, most dangerous animals,” says archaeologist Margaret Conkey of the University of Berkeley in California. By depicting animals that were clearly not on the menu of Paleolithic cuisine, but symbolized danger, strength, and power, artists, according to Klott, “understood their essence.”

Archaeologists paid attention to exactly how the images were included in the wall space. In one of the rooms, a cave bear is depicted in red ocher without the lower part of its body, so that it appears, says Klott, “as if it were coming out of the wall.” In the same room, archaeologists also discovered images of two stone goats. The horns of one of them are natural crevices in the wall, which the artist widened.

Image of a horse in a niche (source - Donsmaps.com)

Rock art clearly played a significant role in the spiritual life of prehistoric people. This can be confirmed by two large triangles (symbols of femininity and fertility?) and an image of a creature with human legs, but with the head and body of a bison. Probably, Stone Age people hoped in this way to appropriate at least partially the power of animals. The cave bear, apparently, occupied a special position. 55 bear skulls, one of which lies on a fallen boulder, as if on an altar, suggest the cult of this beast. Which also explains the choice of Chauvet Cave by the artists - dozens of potholes in the floor indicate that this was the hibernation site of giant bears.

Ancient people came again and again to look at rock art. The 10-meter-long “horse panel” shows traces of soot left by torches that were mounted in the wall after it was covered with painting. These marks, according to Conkey, are on top of a layer of mineralized sediments covering the images. If painting is the first step on the path to spirituality, then the ability to appreciate it is undoubtedly the second.

At least 6 books and dozens of scientific articles have been published about the Chauvet Cave, not counting sensational materials in the general press, four large albums of beautiful color illustrations with accompanying text have been published and translated into major European languages. The documentary film “Cave of Forgotten Dreams 3D” will be released in Russian theaters on December 15. The director of the film is German Werner Herzog.

Picture "Cave of Forgotten Dreams" appreciated at the 61st Berlin Film Festival. More than a million people went to see the film. This is the highest-grossing documentary film in 2011.

According to new data, the age of the coal used to paint the pictures on the wall of the Chauvet cave is 36,000 years old, and not 31,000, as previously thought.

Refined radiocarbon dating methods show that the settlement of Central and Western Europe by modern humans (Homo sapiens) began 3 thousand years earlier than thought, and occurred faster. The time of cohabitation between sapiens and Neanderthals in most parts of Europe was reduced from about 10 to 6 thousand years or less. The final disappearance of European Neanderthals may also have occurred several millennia earlier.

The famous British archaeologist Paul Mellars published a review of recent advances in the development of radiocarbon dating, which have led to significant changes in our understanding of the chronology of events that occurred more than 25 thousand years ago.

The accuracy of radiocarbon dating in last years increased sharply due to two circumstances. Firstly, methods have emerged for high-quality purification of organic substances, primarily collagen isolated from ancient bones, from all foreign impurities. When it comes to very ancient samples, even an insignificant admixture of foreign carbon can lead to serious distortions. For example, if a 40,000-year-old sample contained only 1% modern carbon, this would reduce the “radiocarbon age” by as much as 7,000 years. As it turned out, most ancient archaeological finds contain such impurities, so their age was systematically underestimated.

The second source of errors, which was finally eliminated, is due to the fact that the content of the radioactive isotope 14C in the atmosphere (and, consequently, in organic matter formed in different eras) is not constant. The bones of people and animals that lived during periods of high levels of 14C in the atmosphere initially contained more of this isotope than expected, and therefore their age was again underestimated. In recent years, a number of extremely precise measurements have been made that have made it possible to reconstruct the fluctuations of 14C in the atmosphere over the past 50 millennia. For this, unique marine deposits were used in some areas of the World Ocean, where sediment accumulated very quickly, Greenland ice, cave stalagmites, coral reefs, etc. In all these cases, it was possible for each layer to compare radiocarbon dates with others obtained on the basis ratio of oxygen isotopes 18O/16O or uranium and thorium.

As a result, correction scales and tables were developed that dramatically increased the accuracy of radiocarbon dating of samples older than 25 thousand years. What did the updated dates tell us?

It was previously believed that modern humans (Homo sapiens) appeared in southeastern Europe approximately 45,000 years ago. From here they gradually settled in a western and northwestern direction. The peopling of Central and Western Europe continued, according to “uncorrected” radiocarbon dates, for approximately 7 thousand years (43-36 thousand years ago); the average rate of advancement is 300 meters per year. Refined dating shows that settlement occurred faster and began earlier (46-41 thousand years ago; advancement speed up to 400 meters per year). At about the same speed, agricultural culture later spread in Europe (10-6 thousand years ago), also coming from the Middle East. It is curious that both waves of settlement followed two parallel paths: the first along the Mediterranean coast from Israel to Spain, the second along the Danube Valley, from the Balkans to Southern Germany and further to Western France.

In addition, it turned out that the period of cohabitation between modern humans and Neanderthals in most areas of Europe was significantly shorter than thought (not 10,000 years, but only about 6,000), and in some areas, for example in western France, even less - only 1-2 thousand years old. According to updated dating, some of the brightest samples cave painting turned out to be much older than thought; the beginning of the Aurignac era, marked by the appearance of various complex products made of bone and horn, also moved into the depths of time (41,000 thousand years ago according to new ideas).

Paul Mellars believes that previously published datings of the latest Neanderthal sites (in Spain and Croatia; both sites, according to “unspecified” radiocarbon dating, are 31-28 thousand years old) also need to be revised. In reality, these finds are most likely several thousand years older.

All this shows that the indigenous Neanderthal population of Europe fell to the onslaught of the Middle Eastern newcomers much faster than thought. The superiority of the Sapiens - technological or social - was too great, and neither the physical strength of the Neanderthals, nor their endurance, nor their adaptability to the cold climate could save the doomed race.

Chauvet's painting is amazing in many ways. Take, for example, camera angles. It was common for cave artists to depict animals in profile. Of course, here too this is typical for most of the drawings, but there are breakthroughs, as in the above fragment, where the buffalo’s face is shown in three-quarters. In the following picture you can also see a rare image from the front:

Maybe this is an illusion, but a distinct feeling of composition is created - the lions are sniffing in anticipation of prey, but have not yet seen the bison, and it has clearly tensed and frozen, feverishly wondering where to run. True, judging by the dull look, he doesn’t think well.

(source - popular-archaeology.com)

In the recently released science fiction film “Prometheus,” the cave, which promises the discovery of an extraterrestrial civilization that once visited our planet, is copied completely from Chauvet, including this wonderful group, which includes people who are completely inappropriate here.

Still from the film “Prometheus” (dir. R. Scott, 2012)

(source - Donsmaps.com)

During the Pliocene and especially in the Pleistocene, ancient hunters exerted significant pressure on nature. The idea that the extinction of the mammoth, woolly rhinoceros, cave bear, and cave lion is associated with warming and the end of the Ice Age was first questioned by the Ukrainian paleontologist I.G. Pidoplichko, who expressed what seemed at the time a seditious hypothesis that man was to blame for the extinction of the mammoth. Later discoveries confirmed the validity of these assumptions. The development of radiocarbon analysis methods showed that the last mammoths ( Elephas primigenius) lived at the very end of the Ice Age, and in some places lived until the beginning of the Holocene. At the Predmost site of Paleolithic man (Czechoslovakia), the remains of a thousand mammoths were found. There are known massive finds of mammoth bones (more than 2 thousand individuals) at the Volchya Griva site near Novosibirsk, dating back 12 thousand years. The last mammoths in Siberia lived only 8-9 thousand years ago. The destruction of the mammoth as a species is undoubtedly the result of the activities of ancient hunters.

An important character in Chauvet's paintings was the big-horned deer.

The art of Upper Paleolithic animalists serves, along with paleontological and archaeozoological finds, as an important source of information about what animals our ancestors hunted. Until recently, the Late Paleolithic drawings from the caves of Lascaux in France (17 thousand years old) and Altamira in Spain (15 thousand years old) were considered the oldest and most complete, but later the Chauvet caves were discovered, which gives us a new range of images of the mammal fauna of that time. Along with relatively rare drawings of a mammoth (among them an image of a baby mammoth, strikingly reminiscent of the baby mammoth Dima discovered in the permafrost of the Magadan region) or an alpine ibex ( Capra ibex) there are many images of two-horned rhinoceroses, cave bears ( Ursus spelaeus), cave lions ( Panthera spelaea), Tarpanov ( Equus gmelini).

The images of rhinoceroses in Chauvet Cave raise many questions. This is undoubtedly not a woolly rhinoceros - the drawings depict a two-horned rhinoceros with larger horns, without traces of hair, with a pronounced skin fold, characteristic of the living species of the one-horned Indian rhinoceros ( Rhinocerus indicus). Perhaps this is Merck's rhinoceros ( Dicerorhinus kirchbergensis), who lived in southern Europe until the end of the Late Pleistocene? However, if from a woolly rhinoceros, former target hunt in the Paleolithic and disappeared by the beginning of the Neolithic, quite numerous remains of skin with hair, horny growths on the skull have been preserved (in Lvov there is even the only stuffed animal of this species in the world), then from Merck’s rhinoceros only bone remains have reached us, and keratin “horns” "have not survived. Thus, the discovery in Chauvet Cave poses the question: what type of rhinoceros was known to its inhabitants? Why are the rhinoceroses from Chauvet Cave depicted in herds? It is very likely that Paleolithic hunters were also to blame for the disappearance of the Merck rhinoceros.

We don’t see them vacationing alone. Always hunting, and always with almost a whole pride.

In general, the admiration of primitive man for the huge, strong and fast animals around him, be it a big-horned deer, a bison or a bear, is understandable. It’s even somehow absurd to put yourself next to them. He didn't bet. There is something to learn from us, who fill our virtual “caves” with immeasurable quantities of our own or family photographs. Yes, something, but narcissism was not characteristic of the first people. But the same bear was depicted with the greatest care and trepidation:

The gallery ends with the strangest drawing in Chauvet, definitely of cult purpose. It is located in the farthest corner of the grotto and is made on a rocky ledge, which has (for good reason, presumably) a phallic shape

In literature, this character is usually referred to as a “sorcerer” or taurocephalus. In addition to the bull’s head, we see another, lion-like, woman’s legs and a deliberately enlarged, let’s say, womb, which forms the center of the entire composition. Compared to their colleagues in the Paleolithic workshop, the craftsmen who painted this sanctuary look like pretty avant-garde artists. We know individual images of the so-called. “Venus”, male sorcerers in the form of animals and even scenes hinting at the intercourse of an ungulate with a woman, but in order to mix all of the above so thickly... It is assumed (see, for example, http://www.ancient-wisdom.co.uk/ francech auvet.htm) that the image of the female body was the earliest, and the heads of the lion and bull were painted later. It is interesting that there is no overlap of later drawings with previous ones. Obviously, maintaining the integrity of the composition was part of the artist’s plans.