Word: chauvet
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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When the French government last month announced that a local official, Jean-Marie Chauvet, had discovered the stunning Paleolithic cave near Avignon, experts swiftly hailed the 20,000-year-old paintings as a trove rivaling-and perhaps surpassing-those of Lascaux and Altamira. "This is a virgin site-it's completely intact. It's great art," exulted Jean Clottes, an adviser to the French Culture Ministry and a leading authority on prehistoric art. It has also reopened some of the oldest and least settled of questions: When, how and above all why did Homo sapiens start making...
...span of human prehistory, the Cro-Magnon people who drew the profusion of animals on the bulging limestone walls of the Chauvet cave were fairly late arrivals. Human technology-the making of tools from stone-had already been in existence for nearly 2 million years. There are traces of symbolism and ritual in burial sites of Neanderthals, an earlier species, dating back to 100,000 B.P. (before the present). Not only did the placement of the bodies seem meaningful, but so did the surrounding pebbles and bones with fragmentary patterns scratched on them. These, says Clottes, "do indicate that...
...itself a startling act of lateral thinking, an outward projection of huge cultural consequence, and Homo sapiens did not produce it quickly. As much time elapsed between the first recognizable art and the cave paintings of Lascaux and Altamira, about 15 to 20 millenniums, as separates Lascaux (or Chauvet) from the first TV broadcasts. But now it was possible to see an objective image in shared space, one that was not the property of particular bodies and had a life of its own; and from this point the whole history of human visual communication unfolds...
Stung by lessons learned at Altamira and Lascaux, where initial unrestricted access to the caves obliterated archaeological clues and led to the rapid deterioration of artwork, the French Culture Ministry has put the Chauvet cave off limits to all but a handful of experts and installed video surveillance cameras and police guards at the entrance. "Our goal," says Baghain, "is to keep the cave in this virgin state so that research can, in theory, continue indefinitely...
...further research is needed to establish one fact about the Chauvet cave art: it was created by artists of remarkable talent. "I remember standing in front of the paintings of the horses facing the rhinos and being profoundly moved by the artistry," says Clottes. "Tears were running down my cheeks. I was witnessing one of the world's great masterpieces...