Israeli researchers devise woolly solution to enigma of why Levant has no cave art

Tel Aviv team suggests European underground paintings beseeched cosmic powers not to let megaherbivores disappear — but the creatures were already long gone in the Mideast

Sue Surkes is The Times of Israel's environment reporter

A scene from Upper Paleolithic Chauvet cave, France. (Prof. Jean Clottes)
A scene from Upper Paleolithic Chauvet cave, France. (Prof. Jean Clottes)

Early humans living in the southern Levant, including Israel, did not create the kind of exquisite cave art that their descendants drew in France, Spain and other parts of Europe, because the huge creatures depicted on walls deep in the bowels of the earth in Europe had already become extinct in the Near East, Tel Aviv University researchers have proposed.

Writing in the latest issue of the Journal of the Israel Prehistoric Society, Tel Aviv University Prof. Ran Barkai and other researchers looked deep underground, into the cosmos and into the ancient human psyche to try and solve what they call “one of the most intriguing enigmas in Levantine prehistoric research.”

Despite 100 years of archaeological excavation, not one cave painting from the Upper Paleolithic period at the end of the so-called Old Stone Age has yet been discovered in Israel or anywhere else in the region.

By contrast, stunning cave art found in 12 locations in France, Italy, and Romania has been attributed to the same Aurignacian culture that passed through the Near East on its way from Africa to Europe.

So why didn’t they leave their mark on cave walls here?

According to Barkai, who penned the paper with Ilan Dagoni, Miki Ben-Dor, and Yafit Kedar, the ancestors of the Aurignacians, anatomically modern Homo sapiens, had encountered elephants and rhinos as they made their way out of Africa some 70,000 to 60,000 years ago.

But settling in the Levant some 60,000 to 55,000 years ago, they found a landscape extirpated of any herbivorous megafauna, with huge elephants and other beasts long hunted out of existence, leaving only smaller animals.

Only once they continued onto Europe did the ancestors of the Aurignacians come face to face again with giant animals, in the form of woolly mammoths and woolly rhinos.

In this reconstruction by Dana Ackerfeld of Tel Aviv University’s Institute of Archaeology, prehistoric hunters attack an elephant with spears

As they settled in Europe, they started to see the decline and disappearance of these huge creatures. Scientists have hypothesized that both species, which went extinct around 10,000 years ago, were driven to obsolescence by climate change and human hunting.

The researchers propose that “a sense of anxiety or even dread accompanying the decline and eventual extinction of megaherbivores in the region” drove Aurignacians into the deepest parts of caves, to the places where they believed the conscious world met the underworld, “the place of plenty and the origin of all goods on earth,” to beg for their return.

They postulate that the lack of oxygen deep underground induced visions, and that the paintings were intended not as art in the modern sense, but as shamanic invocations to Mother Earth, accompanied by geometric signs and in some cases handprints.

“We see art not as a decorative or aesthetic expression alone, but as a mediator between humans and the world they live in, as a way of expressing fears and desires by sending messages to the cosmos… to solve problems, and achieve harmony and well-being,” the researchers wrote.

Prof. Ran Barkai (Tel Aviv University)

“To put it all together as a package: the cave as a context, the wall as a membrane (between the here-and-now world and the underworld), the geometric motifs and the prevalent animal depictions, were all part of a consciousness-expanding experience intended to communicate with the cosmos in times of need, trouble and despair,” the authors wrote. “And this is, as we see it, the Upper Paleolithic European story.”

By the time some Aurignacians migrated back to the Levant, the megaherbivores were long gone and “they had no one to communicate with or were not experiencing the distress and upheaval that would have given rise to art.”

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