Word: bisons
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...since the dead sea Scrolls has anything found in a cave caused so much excitement. The paintings and engravings, more than 300 of them, amount to a sort of Ice Age Noah's ark-images of bison, mammoths and woolly rhinoceroses, of a panther, an owl, even a hyena. Done on the rock walls with plain earth pigments-red, black, ocher-they are of singular vitality and power, and despite their inscrutability to modern eyes, they will greatly enrich our picture of Cro-Magnon life and culture...
...personal decoration-ornaments such as beads, bracelets, pendants and necklaces. The body was certainly one of the first surfaces for symbolic expression. What did such symbols communicate? Presumably the wearer's difference from others, as a member of a distinct group, tribe or totemic family: that he was a bison-man, say, and not a reindeer...
...images; they were meant to produce results. But what results? To represent something, to capture its image on a wall in colored earths and animal fat, is in some sense to capture and master it; to have power over it. Lascaux is full of nonthreatening animals, including wild cattle, bison and horses, but Chauvet pullulates with dangerous ones-cave bears, a panther and no fewer than 50 woolly rhinos. Such creatures, to paraphrase Claude Lavi-Strauss, were good to think with, not good to eat. We can assume they had a symbolic value, maybe even a religious value, to those...
Photographs of the Stone Age art show images of lions, bison, deer, bears, horses and some 50 woolly rhinos. "These paintings are more beautiful than those in Lascaux," says Patrice Baghain, the regional head of cultural affairs. "There is a sense of rhythm and texture that is truly remarkable." One mural shows several horses apparently charging-in a Stone Age mismatch-toward two rhinos...
...particular interest to Jean Clottes, France's foremost expert on prehistoric rock art, is the fact that, in contrast to previous cave artwork, images of predatory and dangerous species-bears, lions, rhinos, a panther and a hyena-far outnumber the horses, bison, deer and mammoths usually hunted by Stone Age people. "The paintings in this cave," he says, "will force us to change how we interpret Stone...