Cave Painting: Rethinking Our Ancient Past The people of prehistoric times appear to have lived more like modern humans than primitive cave-dwellers
by Leonardo Vintiñi for Epochtimes
Dec. 15, 2008
“Cave art is simple and complex, delicate and temporal, captivating and magical, an expression of the ways of seeing the world, ways of asking, curing, communicating, and counting, among many other functions that it could have accomplished, but it is also a material that offers more problems than solutions to study.”—Francisco M. Galván,
Mexican archeologist
Imagine if Earth experienced a planet-wide cataclysm, perhaps due to an asteroid. Our planet would reverberate from the impact, producing enormous tidal waves (the highest ever seen) that would wipe 80 percent of civilization off the map. Most remnants of modern technology would be destroyed. The little that remained would eventually corrode over time, becoming no longer recognizable. After the smoke clears in our scenario, we find a few survivors—a small number of individuals who eventually begin a new cycle of human civilization.
This post-cataclysm vision has been imagined in several works of fiction, such as “The New Adam.” Often times, these writings aim to bring an understanding that such an event could actually occur, but it also offers another thought to ponder: the strong possibility that it has already occurred in a remote past.
A New Picture of Prehistoric Man
In 1937, archeologists discovered engraved stones that directly challenged our understanding of human history. In the caves of Lussac-les-Châteaux, carved stones found to have been made 15,000 years ago revealed the unexpected:
graphic depictions of people wearing boots, pants, shirts, and hats.
“After the engraved stones of Lussac-les-Châteaux, Pre-History got a new aspect, a new meaning, the past came out of darkness and our ancestors shed the ‘coarse rags’ with which they were willingly covering themselves until then,” said the late Robert Charroux, an archeologist and researcher who dedicated his career to uncovering the true story of human history.
These carved figures are a testimony to the technology and clothing that “prehistoric man” enjoyed. International scientific circles were greatly astonished in 2002 when it was confirmed that the faces depicted in the La Marche caves were not contemporary falsifications but official historic records indicating, without a doubt, that prehistoric man did not possess the deeply rooted animal-skin-clad and tangled-hair stereotype that modern anthropologists have insisted on.
Instead, these ancient records describe a rather refined population sporting short hair, groomed beards, and tailored clothing. Some stones show details of men riding horseback and perfectly vested in an altogether modern style.
Investigators like Michael Rappenglueck of the University of Munich insist that these important artifacts are simply ignored by modern science. While some of the stones from Laussac-les-Châteaux are currently on display at Paris’s Museum of Man, the ones that clearly portray prehistoric man as a creature born of advanced culture and thought—and not the caveman caricature that we’ve come to understand—remain hidden away.
But why would science choose to ignore these artifacts? And why hasn’t our view of history changed in light of this evidence?
Tassili and Tanzania: Testimony of the Impossible
Archeologists have discovered several thousand ancient images lining petrified vaults across the planet—San Francisco de la Sierra, Altamira, Vilhonneur, Lascaux, Chusca, Cosquer, Cap Blanc Gönnersdorf, Hayonim, Balzi Rosi, and more. While we refer to their era as prehistoric, these cultures of the distant past have meticulously recorded many of the daily events of their world on the walls, floors, and ceilings of rock. The great majority of these paintings are images of wild beasts, scenes of hunting, or religious and cultural rituals.
Pigments for these works have been made from a mixture of water, mineral, and vegetable paints, fat, plaster, urine, and even feces. Yet despite the precariousness of the ink and the durability of the “canvas,” these cave paintings exhibit an artistic sensitivity and an accurate eye. The faithfulness of detail, proportions, and anatomy of these prehistoric sketches are frequently much more exquisite and refined than those found during the early part of our recorded history—artwork from a much later time period.
Curiously, art-making of the last few hundred years bears a closer resemblance to this prehistoric cave painting than it does to the primitive renderings that were actually made closer to our time period. Yet the level of artistry exhibited in these works is not nearly as unexpected as the concepts they illustrate.
Of all the archeological findings in the world, Algeria’s Tassili caves may represent the greatest collection of work that threatens to undermine the current understanding of modern science. Several thousand engravings and paintings dated at over 15,000 years old reveal unusual scenes for a population believed to be incredibly primitive.
On these rock walls we find men with helmets and antennas, single-piece body suits, humanoid figures more than 15 feet tall, and objects similar to space ships flying across the firmament.
In Tanzania, paintings similar to those at Tassili describe scenes that seem to reflect our current science fiction—from enormous faceless figures to depictions of people with extremely unusual clothing and scenes of what some believe are about alien contact. These engravings—some nearly 30,000 years old—stand in stark defiance of our modern understanding of history.
While various explanations for these strange drawings have been offered, the heretical suggestion of ancient alien life is no less reasonable. If the figures of animals engraved in these Tanzanian caves are presented in such faithful proportions, why would these ancient artists have represented so unfittingly all manner of artifacts and intentionally distorted the human figure unless they meant to portray the unthinkable? Scenes range from what some interpret as alien abductions, hot air balloons, stairs, and giraffes with collars suggesting some kind of domestication.
Those Strange People of the Past
The suggestions from evidence provided above are certainly bold claims when placed before the dominant
anthropological understanding of human history. The predominant understanding insists on the same conceptual narrative, often exhibiting little change despite several contradictory discoveries. To affirm that modern mankind is just one of several cycles of human civilization, instead of the pinnacle end product that originated from cave-dwelling carnivores, threatens what has become a very important fairy tale.
In some sites, up to a dozen distinct painting styles can be found superimposed over each other, with dates ranging from 15,000 to 50,000 years of antiquity. Very likely, the artists of these differing eras were responding to common knowledge that has since been forgotten. If we are to attempt a real understanding of this work, it is only fitting to ask how much we really know about how our cave-decorating ancestors lived. If they were not primitives, from where did they come?
If 30,000 years ago humankind already knew how to weave cloth and tailor clothing, where are the original primitives to be found? Spurned by the incessant surge of recent findings that oblige us to retrace and rethink our true history, we shouldn’t remain tied to a perception of our ancestry that no longer correlates to contradictory evidence. We must instead limit ourselves to reconstructing step by step the giant and often misunderstood puzzle that our human past truly represents.
THE CAVE PAINTINGS ARE KOOL
I’m sold, hook line and sinker. If there was already a generation of advanced man before us, that would tie up so many loose ends in history for me. The missing link? Nope. How did complex civilizations just pop up out of nowhere? Easy, because they had previously been civilized before our recorded history even began! This is fascinating, thank you so much for this article to pique my imagination. I’m sure this is all i will read about for the next few days.
You mentioned the cycle of human civilization. Like a wheel I guess. I believe as you do. Modern humans have forgotten their history. Some catastrophe must have happened that broke the link to our past. So much evidence that hints at our past but is just ignored. I honestly don’t know why the truth scares people.