Ice Age Cave Art: Unlocking the Mysteries Behind These Markings | Nat Geo Live

Genevieve Von Petzinger: This incredible art that mostly dates between 10 and 40,000 years ago. What we often think of, of course, is the animals. But there's this other enormous group called the geometric signs that outnumber the animals and the humans at most sites by a ratio of two to one or more. (applause)

So, June 2014, myself and my husband and project photographer, Dillon, we were in Northern Spain. We were at a site called Cullavera Cave and we were so excited to finally be there. Cullavera, the entrance is 30 meters up, it's 100 feet, it's a cathedral entrance in a wooded hillside in the foothills of the Pyrenees. There's like a whole wreath of dangling green vines coming down, it's inviting. It wants you to come in.

And so I can understand why people might've decided to go in there 14,000 years ago. What's a little more difficult to understand is why they decided to go so far in. Because the very first art is 780 meters, half a mile, into the cave. You can probably just see some faint pigment markings on the wall that is not modern graffiti. These are not animals, but they're not writing either, these are the geometric signs. They came half a mile through the cave to make these.

If we enhance it, you can see a little bit more. This is a very cool color enhancement program created by American rock-art researcher, Jon Harman, and suddenly you can see more. But still no animals. Nothing as far as the eye can see and this is very unusual. Animals are normally found everywhere. But don't worry, we've just got to keep going a little farther.

So we keep going, three quarters of a mile in and there's another little passageway here with two horses. So the animals are represented, they're just in a completely different section of the cave. And as you can see they're very simple, but we also have all this detail that kind of lets you know that there's something going on. There's a hint here that there's some artistic ability that's underlying what they're doing here. So we've got two horses, that's it.

You keep going a little farther and now there's a little crevice off to the right this time. And somebody went up there to make these little dots. Let me enhance it for you. But these little dots. Somebody took their finger and dipped it in paint and made those marks. And as so often happens when I find myself in these places, I'm like, "What were you doing here?"

Why did you come three quarters of a mile, or 1.2 kilometers in a cave to make dots? So let me introduce you to some of this Paleolithic, or Stone Age, art that mostly dates between 10 and 40,000 years ago. What we often think of, of course, is the animals. The animals are by far the majority of what we call figurative or representational art. And a lot of it is hunting animals so we've already seen a horse, here's a deer we have a fabulous purple bison.

It's the only one of its kind because most of the art, when it's painted, is either red or black. And so this fabulous purple bison, I just love him, he's like this unique little guy hanging out in northern Spain. So we've got him and then also we do have a few other figurative images of humans. And this is engraving, this is the other way that they made the art.

But there's this other enormous group called the geometric signs that outnumber the animals and the humans at most sites by a ratio of two to one or more. They can be simple things, like the circle. They can be more complex things like this incredibly complicated sign that was located in this panel in Spain, which is a one-off. It's the only one of its kind in the world. They can be dots, they can be lines, they can be triangles.

You'll see there's a full range, everything that's abstract and that's kind of how they've been defined over the years. Abstract characters that don't represent anything from the mundane world. So, let me tell you some of my fun results. There are only 32 signs across an entire continent and a 30,000 year time period. My friends, these are not random doodles or decorations.

So, what I noticed was that this, each one of them has its own distinct patterning, too. These are not all doing the same things, they're doing different things in different places. So there were patterns across space and time. And that's what's so intriguing and exciting. So let me show you a couple of those patterns. This is a child's hand. This is 27,000 year old child's hand.

Now, hands are a fascinating one because they were at their most popular at the very earliest time period. So between 25 and 40,000 is when we find hands. After that they start to fade out of popularity until they vanish towards the end of the Ice Age, they just go away, people stop making them. So that's one pattern.

Another pattern that's very interesting is this is called a tectiform. So this is like a roof-shaped and these are only made in the Dordogne region of France between 13,000 and 17,000 years ago. It's where they're all located except for one site 250 miles to the south across the Pyrenees Mountains in Spain. And it is exactly the same. I've talked to the researcher at that site, we've looked at pictures, even down to the little dots that you can see, the technique that was used, it's the exact same thing.

How did it get there? This is what's so fun about the signs is that we can actually follow people and ideas at these incredible time depths and get a sense of how their culture was developing. How were they learning about symbolism? What was going on? So, we've got these signs that were being used very purposefully by people who obviously know what they meant.

The obvious question people always want to know is, is it writing? And I'm sorry, I'm here today to shatter that it's not writing yet. Though, this inscription as it's called, it's called the inscription of La Pasiega. This is a one-off. And this is the thing, we don't have the consistency yet. We don't have enough characters to represent spoken language, we're not there yet.

But that doesn't mean that there's not very interesting things going on. It's really funny 'cause I just spent all this time building my nice little list of 32 and now my next job is probably going to be to smash it back apart. Because there's some major omissions there. Where's the landscape features? Where's the weaponry? Where's the daily life? Did nobody look up at the sky? You know?

And so I think that, personally, and this is what we're starting to dig into now, I think a lot of these geometric signs might actually be representational, as well. And it could give us some fascinating insight into thematic categories and how these people were understanding their world. Quick example, the penniform. So penniform means feather-shaped in Latin and it's being treated as a geometric sign, but there are contexts such as this where people have muttered it kind of looks like a tree.

So my response would be, maybe a tree sometimes is just a tree. (laughter) Maybe we don't have to over-complicate this. And so this is the kind of thing we're looking at as well as questions about clusters of dots potentially being constellations or other things which would make really good sense and we see in other rock art traditions.

What I've done so far is just the baseline. This was the start, those were some really simple questions. There is so much left to be done. In Europe, one big category that we're still missing here is that my database does not have any of the portable art in it yet. And yet, the 16,000 year old necklace, for instance, from a burial in France has 45 different geometric configurations on it.

Think about how that can help me understand what I'm seeing on a big panel on a wall. They seem to be starting to group them up. The line, the cross, the line, I've seen that on a cave wall about 50 miles from there. So, this is part of the story and there are dusty artifacts loitering all over Europe in museums waiting to be documented.

So this is very much the start. And imagine if we can start expanding the work that I'd been doing in western Europe to a global level. Now those would be some very big patterns. Thank you. (applause)