La Pasiega Cave Paintings (Artefact I)
WUNDERKAMMER #1
Artefact No: 1
Description: Entoptic Phenomena, Red Ochre Symbol
Location: La Pasiega Cave, Cantabria, Spain
Age: 64,000 years
Ben Timberlake February 15, 2024
The first artefact in our wunderkammer, or cabinet of wonders, is wonder itself.
It is an abstract sign of red ochre, painted deep in the cave of La Pasiega in Cantabria, Northern Spain. It dated to over 64,000 years ago. It is amongst the earliest examples of art that we know.
There are earlier claims to the first aesthetic act. Flint tools from 200,000 years ago whose balance and grace go beyond their utilitarian function. Pierced shells that may have been the first body adornments. A cross-hatched piece of red-ochre 73,000 years old recently found in South Africa.
A close-up photo and drawing of the panel with the ladder-motif. Later artists added the cascading dots, the enigmatic symbol to the right, and even the hindquarters of an animal within the centre square.
But these are examples of more art-in-work rather than a true work of art and none have the sheer beauty and sophistication of this symbol. 64,000 years ago someone chose to take this sign, which until then existed only inside their head, and paint it on the cave wall. This creative act - the earliest demonstration of the ability to use, interpret and respond to symbols - is one of the key defining traits of the modern mind, of the very essence of what it is to be human. It is pure artistic expression. It is an act so perfectly useless as to be sacred.
Symbols like this are known as entoptic phenomena (literally ‘within vision’) that occur somewhere between the retina and the brain. You might see them in their most basic forms now if you close your eyes: tiny pinpricks of red snow, phosphenes, and random meteora. Some are caused by implosions of dying proteins within the eye’s rod-cells, others by static within the ophthalmic nerve’s wiring, or at the processing centre of the visual cortex.
“This creative act - the earliest demonstration of the ability to use, interpret and respond to symbols - is one of the key defining traits of the modern mind, of the very essence of what it is to be human. It is pure artistic expression. It is an act so perfectly useless as to be sacred.”
We don’t know exactly how or why these symbols are produced within our vision. We do know that they increase in number and gain in complexity if we put our minds and bodies through stress: tough rituals or religious ordeals, sleep deprivation, extreme exertion, fasting, drumming, dancing, sweat lodges, trauma, or drugs. All humans appear to be neurologically hardwired to see entoptic phenomena, and they occur universally within the earliest art, regardless of time and culture.
The red sign in the picture is a basic ladder motif. Other common motifs might include lines of dots, concentric circles, zig-zags, and diamond patterns. Sometimes they remind me of the earliest single-celled lifeforms and in many ways that is what they are: the first sparks of imagination, the protean beginnings of art and culture.
The archaeologist David Lewis-Williams wrote a paper called ‘The Signs of All Times,’ that looked at entoptic phenomena in rock art from across the world. He proposed that there are three stages to these hallucinations: the basic entoptic phenomena, then the ‘construal stage’ when the brain tries to make sense of the images, and finally the Deep Trance stage.
In the Construal Stage, our brains rely on previous experiences and culture to interpret these minor hallucinations: a line of dots may be seen by one person as a snake and another as a flight of birds. Environment is key: a San Bushman doesn’t hallucinate a polar bear and an Inuit doesn’t dream an eland.
Between the second and third stages is something known as the vortex. Once again, this visual theme appears across many different cultures and periods. It is a buckling of the visual field and a collapse of reality that tapers into a singular point. In rock art this is represented in a number of ways, ladder symbols may multiply into elaborate lattices which begin to form a funnel. Or lines of dots may converge into a crack in the cave wall. In San rock art this is sometimes represented as a swarm of bees entering their hive.
Through and beyond the vortex, in the final stage of Deep Trance, our brains splice animals with human forms to create therianthropes. Again, these types of hallucinations are universal but the form they take is local: a Palaeolithic hunter imagines a reindeer man; an ancient Greek creates a goat-man or satyr; a medieval sailor sees a mermaid.
The cave of La Pasiega contains all three stages. Its passages are richly painted with a huge variety of abstract symbols: ladder motifs, dotted lines, claviform shapes, triangles, polygons, and tectiforms. Then there is a wild bestiary: an exquisite deer in red, engraved horses, black ibexes and a bold stylised bison. And human motifs too: vulvas, and hand motifs. And lastly a combination of human and animal: a red human figure with black horns and dotted black mane, a Minotaur of sorts, at the heart of this eerie and ancient labyrinth.
But here comes the kicker. The art in this cave has been known to archaeologists for decades, and for all of this time we understood it to be the work of modern man, Homo sapiens. Rock art is very hard to date accurately. Sometimes we can roughly attribute pieces of art to certain periods stylistically. Other times, if there is charcoal present or other organic substances, we can use Carbon-14 dating. But much of the art in La Pasiega is made with mineral pigments that defy this type of dating.
Recently an international team of archaeologists sought to sidestep this problem by using uranium-thorium dating on small calcite concretions covering part of the ladder symbol. As rainwater leaches through the soil above the cave it picks up mineral traces, including uranium, which drip into the cave system below, forming stalagmites and stalactites, some of which cover the art. The uranium is trapped in this mineral veneer and - because uranium decays at a set rate into thorium- measuring how much of either element is present provides an accurate date for the formation. Anything below the layer must be older.
The uranium-thorium dates took the team by surprise because 64,000 years ago we know of only one species of human in Europe and it wasn’t us; it was our ancient cousins the Neanderthals, who we had always assumed weren’t capable of creating such art. Despite still being a byword for oafish savagery Neanderthals have recently been shown to bury their dead with care, use medicinal plants for their ills, and harness complex technology. In their paper in Science the team concluded that Neanderthals and early modern humans were cognitively indistinguishable. Alistair Pike, who was part of the team, said, “What we’ve got here is a smoking gun that really overturns the notion that Neanderthals were knuckle-dragging cavemen”. If creativity is what defines humans, then Neanderthals are us too.
In the West nowadays, we still reference entoptic phenomena in popular culture. And like our ancestors we use our environment and life experiences to make sense of these images: drawing stars or rings of tweety-birds around cartoon characters who have received a knock on the head, zig-zags or lightning bolts in association with stress or anger, or use halos or a lightbulb to signify those who have received illumination.
These sparks of wonder have been with us since our earliest days. We’ve come a long way together. And that’s how I hope you will think about this strange red image: not as something ancient within a distant cave, but living and within you now.
Ben Timberlake is an archaeologist who works in Iraq and Syria. His writing has appeared in Esquire, the Financial Times and the Economist. He is the author of 'High Risk: A True Story of the SAS, Drugs and other Bad Behaviour'.
