The Altamira cave is a benchmark in world Paleolithic art. It was the first evidence of prehistoric art to be discovered, and having been inhabited for some 25,000 years, it covers almost all styles of cave painting, which is why it is known as the "encyclopedia of Paleolithic art". It leaves no one indifferent, not even in the past, as its discovery generated a controversy that would last for decades.
A narrow crevice on the side of a small hill, 120 meters above the Saja river valley. That's what the tenant Modesto Cubillas saw in 1868 when he was following his dog during an afternoon's hunt. That crevice led to the cave that would later be called Altamira, located in Santillana del Mar, Cantabria, Spain.
Sealed from the outside for who knows how long, it is believed that it was the detonations from a nearby quarry that opened the crevice through which Cubillas' dog entered. The tenant did not get to see the paintings, but he told the owner of the land, Marcelino Sanz de Sautuola, an amateur explorer of the caves in the region in search of paleontological and prehistoric remains.
It was not until 1879 that Sautuola set out to explore the cave, accompanied by his 8-year-old daughter María. While the father was busy with the stone tools discovered on the floor of the first room of the 270 meters long cave, the girl said "there are painted oxen on the ceiling".
It was the now called "Sistine Chapel of rock art", a magnificent work of art, and for which Altamira is so famous. It was the great hall, about 18 meters long and 9 meters wide. But the key is the height, which varies between 1.90 and 1.10 meters. That is why only a small girl could look up and see a herd of prehistoric bison in red and black: males, females, calves, in the most varied postures and attitudes.
The dean of rock art
Altamira is today a world reference for Paleolithic art. It is a kind of encyclopedia of rock art, since on the walls and ceilings of its rooms one can see manifestations of art made over 25,000 years, covering all the styles, techniques and themes known to Paleolithic art. This is why in 1985 it was declared a World Heritage Site by UNESCO.
Along the walls and ceilings of the cave, you can see engravings and paintings, sometimes separate, sometimes forming part of the same work. The artists have used all the resources, sometimes taking advantage of old drawings or engravings, others accompanying them, even using protuberances of the rock to give volume or mark the eyes.
But Altamira also stands out for being the first. The paintings cover a period from about 36,000 to 12,000 years ago, but they were not the first to be made in prehistory, but the first known evidence that prehistoric man had the capacity to create art.
This is an important detail, since at the time they were made known, prehistory was just beginning as a science. Let us think that they were discovered in 1878, the scientific world was just beginning to digest the fact that there had been a prehistoric man, who was believed to be wild, savage and simian, as Charles Darwin had made known in his books The Origin of Species in 1859 and The Descent of Man in 1871.
When Marcelino Sanz de Sautuola told prehistory experts that he had discovered that cavemen produced art, and not only that, but that it was beautiful, it turned out to be indigestible for the vast majority. They could not accept that those prehistoric brutes could create art, so they preferred to ignore Altamira for decades and even accuse its discoverer of forgery.
The Altamira Controversy
The first descriptions of the paintings were published by Sautuola in his Breves apuntes in 1880. He was convinced that they were from the Stone Age not only because of the extinct animals he saw represented, but also because of the remains of carvings and bone and stone tools that he had discovered there.
However, at that time, prehistory was far from the universities, had not been recognized academically, and there were many who even considered the hobby of searching for and cataloging bone and stone remains assigned to prehistory to be extravagant. Religion still had a very strong weight, and even more so in Sautuola's Spain. So the antiquity of man was not believed to be more than a few thousand years old, as was inferred from the Bible.
From both biology and geology, a hard battle against Christian conservatism was still being fought in the universities. Doubting the literal truth of the Bible was not allowed, and some even went further, claiming that prehistorians were nothing more than deceivers who sought to attack the foundations of the Christian religion. It was in this context that Sautuola made the Altamira paintings known.
Sautuola was a lawyer who was fond of studying fossils and ancient remains that he found in the large number of caves that existed in northern Spain. Although his training was conservative and Catholic, he believed in the progress of science. That is why he was surprised when the vast majority of scholars of the time rejected that the Altamira paintings were ancient, and even that some even accused him of forging them.
Sautuola published a book with his discoveries, and had replicas of the cave's artwork made. But it was Juan Vilanova y Piera, professor of paleontology at the Central University, who presented them at conferences and meetings of prehistorians, but the condemnation and rejection were overwhelming. No one supported them.
What the Altamira paintings represented was something that broke all the schemes. Not only the Christians, but also those who had taken so much effort to establish prehistory in the few years that the discipline had been alive.
The beautiful paintings of Altamira did not fit into the scientific parameters of the time, they were inadmissible, since only a few stone and bone tools were known. But accepting that the so-called "antediluvian man" could generate art, one of the highest forms of human communication... was incompatible with the concept of primitive man that scholars had.
Road to acceptance
Despite the fact that Vilanova y Piera was a conservative and Catholic man, and that the novelty of the discovery of Altamira advised caution, he did not doubt its antiquity when he visited the cave. Thus, he became its most fervent defender, although he would not live to see the final recognition of Altamira.
It was during an important congress on prehistory held in 1880 in Lisbon, Portugal, where Vilanova y Piera made the incredible paintings of Altamira known to the scientific community. But the listeners not only did not believe him, but also refused to go and see them, and even some famous ones left the conference, to ridicule him. No one believed or could accept that prehistoric man was capable of such beauty as they saw in the reproductions.
Altamira's most bitter enemies were the French prehistorians, mainly Émile Cartaihac and Gabriel de Mortillet. For decades they rejected the antiquity of Altamira, without even having gone to visit it, and most of the scholars followed them. Accusations of forgery even arose, related to the visit of the painter Paul Ratier to the cave, who only put the cave's rock art on paper.
Curiously, in another of the congresses in which Vilanova y Piera tried to achieve acceptance for Altamira, it was again rejected, but one of the main detractors, de Mortillet, presented a paper on Atlantis and its inhabitants.
It was not until 1894 that the wind of change began to blow, hand in hand with new discoveries. This time it was in France where figures were found in various caves such as the mammoths of Chabot, or those of 1897 in Marsuolas, similar to those of Altamira. It was a pity that it came too late for Sautuola and Vilanova y Piera, who had already passed away.
Likewise, it was not until 1902 that Altamira was accepted into the club of those French caves, as it was already one of many. It was his main detractor, Émile Cartaihac, who recognized his error in a famous article titled, precisely, Mea culpa of a skeptic. He even went on to write a series of books on Altamira, after visiting it.
The Importance of Altamira
The studies that followed its official acceptance within the academic world led to the discovery of the exceptional nature of Altamira even within the large number of rock art samples that were becoming known over the decades.
"Altamira is a benchmark for world Paleolithic art, it represents an encyclopedia of Paleolithic art. Because within it are preserved figures made for at least 25,000 years, that is, thanks to Altamira it is possible to recognize a large part of the styles, techniques, and themes of Paleolithic art," Marcos García Diez, a prehistorian at the Complutense University of Madrid and an expert in Paleolithic art, told.
"At the same time, Altamira has represented a 'milestone of Spain's Cultural Heritage', a social, economic and tourist benchmark, which with its ups and downs in its past management, has been a driving force for the development and consideration of Heritage," added García Diez. "Altamira is a World Heritage Site, its art is original and exceptional, and it is representative of the first art, of the symbolic capacities and beliefs of our ancestors."
"Altamira is a cave that leaves no one indifferent due to its aesthetic quality and the high transmission capacity of its works," Diego Garate, a specialist in rock art at the University of Cantabria, also told Muy Interesante. "What's more, the cave houses hundreds of animal representations, making it one of the most complex among the half-thousand caves known today."
25,000 years of history
"The oldest images in Altamira are around 36,000 years old, and correspond to signs that we call claviforms," explained Marcos García Diez. "We don't know what they are, they are a kind of triangles with a pronounced appendage. And it is also possible that there are even older things, it is an intuition, not something proven."
The Altamira cave was inhabited more or less continuously until about 12,000 years ago, giving it a range of some 25,000 years of occupation, during which the artists have left a great variety of styles on its walls and ceilings.
"Although the image of the bison eclipses us, which were made between 14,000 and 12,500 years ago," explained García Diez, "we know that there is a lot of 'intermediate Altamira'. There are moments, possibly between 30,000 and 22,000 years ago, when they painted animals in red. And we know that later there is more than one phase of engravings, where the deer stand out."
"The Altamira of today, the one we know, is the sum of many moments of execution of figures," clarified the prehistorian. "And in each moment, previous images were used in a kind of continuous addition of images. The previous one was not ignored, but new motifs were added to make a new whole. The Altamira of each moment is the Altamira of the new that was being done to which what was previously done was added."
Prehistoric Artists and Their Vision
"The Altamira cave presents several phases of decoration over thousands of years in what we call the Upper Paleolithic," added Diego Garate. "In at least four or five different moments, human groups that inhabited or visited the cave left their imprints on the walls. The famous polychrome bison are just another of those stages in which the cave was decorated."
And Garate continued: "In any case, they were Homo sapiens like us. Organized into more or less small groups but well connected with their neighbors and other inhabitants in a very wide area. Although with a more reduced technology, they shared a large part of the concerns that have occupied human beings throughout the years. That is, they were not very different from ourselves."
"The meaning of Paleolithic art is still a great unknown," explained Garate. "In fact, nowadays we talk more about meanings, that is, in the plural. This is because art appears in very diverse spatial and social contexts, which suggests that art may have had very diverse motivations. In any case, Paleolithic art presents a very scarce graphic diversity, which suggests a kind of control over artistic production, something that must have been imposed by a part of society."
"In this case, art would have a collective value within human groups related to the balance of power. Be that as it may, today we are far from being able to determine the specific reasons why Paleolithic caves were decorated," concluded Garate.
For his part, Marcos García Diez opined that "interpretation is a slippery terrain and one in which there is no agreement. We cannot talk to those who did it and neither do the images that it has left us correspond to a code with which we are accustomed."
"For me," García Diez continued, "Altamira is composed of symbols that integrate a meaning. Which one? I don't know, and also I think it is very possible that the meaning, or the sense, or the use or function has not been constant. What is clear is that they mainly painted what they saw in their natural environment, and the animals that they generally consumed the most. It is very possible that these animals had a special value and meaning for them, to the point that they immortalized them on the wall. But did they immortalize the animal or did they want to immortalize its characteristics?".
Why our ancestors left these artistic samples is something that still eludes specialists, and perhaps it will never be known. Art for art's sake is one of the possibilities. The first interpretations found them a decorative and idle meaning.
Others continued to give them a magical or religious meaning, a search for communion with nature, or to influence hunting. The truth is that part of the art captured in Altamira is magnificent, even from the current artistic point of view. Pablo Picasso is attributed to have said that "from Altamira, everything is decadence."
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