Exhibition text by Amy Kazymerchyk, Writer & Curator

In 2023, a series of engravings discovered inside La Roche-Cotard cave in France’s Loire Valley were dated approximately 60,000 years old. The finding consists of discrete clusters of scratches, thought to be made by fingers. One composition is a rectangle of loosely parallel lines that fan out along the top and sides. Another set comprises long tubular forms, organized in a similar rectangular shape. A third is made up of long squirmy tubes, tiny circles and distorted ovals that are spaced out in more erratic and irregular patterns.

These engravings pre-date most of the identified cave paintings in the world by 20,000–30,000 years. Cave paintings in El Castillo, Spain (40,000 BC), Coliboaia, Romania (32,000 BC), Chauvet, France (30,000 BC) and Nawarla Gabarnmang, Australia (28,000 BC) are highly regarded for the legibility of the animals and people depicted, the perceived narrative structure of their compositions, and the sophisticated use of tools and pigments. They have been touted as evidence of Homo sapiens’ great leap forward into “behavioural modernity,” during which our species superseded earlier hominids. These figurative paintings have influenced disciplines such as archeology and anthropology to associate human consciousness, intelligence and culture with figurative representation.

The Roche-Cotard engravings are currently attributed to Neanderthals, and some researchers have described the compositions as abstract art. This one of the few—if not the first—time, that Neanderthals have been identified as artists—a status previously reserved for sapiens. When the two species coexisted, visual markings made by the former are assumed to plagiarize the culture of the latter. However, the works at La Roche-Cotard pre-date sapiens habitation in the region by about 20,000 years. These independent symbolic gestures imbue archaic humans with advanced cognition previously assumed to solely belong to sapiens. However, their designation still denigrates toolless abstraction as an image-making strategy that belongs to premodern humans.

Modern human’s claim over figuration and artistic tool-making was challenged when Jean-Claude Marquet—the prehistorian who discovered La Roche-Cotard engravings in the 1970s—dug up a stone at the entrance to the cave that had been intentionally chiselled into the shape of a face. Its maker had inserted a bone through the nasal bridge to suggest a set of eyes. This sculpture is dated 75,000 years old, from the Mousterian period. That’s 15,000 years older than the engravings that were found farther back in the cave. Marquet’s discovery suggests not only did Neanderthals have the cognitive capacity to render figurative images and forms, like the mask, but they also possessed the conceptual acuity to choose to do otherwise, as in the engravings.

As archeological research continues, researchers will likely find more artifacts that expand our understanding of the influence of the geological, ocular and acoustic phenomenon of caves on our symbolic thought and dexterity, further back in time. Such artifacts may also broaden our understanding of consciousness and perception. Abstraction in art is often described as a poor rendering of a living being, functional object or habitable place—or even the denigration of a whole, unified, or nameable form. The figure is unconsciously assumed to precede its deconstruction.

But imagine that the fan of parallel lines and constellation of irregular closed loops in la Roche-Cotard engravings are renderings of molecular structure—notations of how matter blooms and decays. The hominids who made them may have recognized these patterns in the way that the minerals of the cave wall crumbled when scratched by a finger, or in how flint flakes off when struck by another rock. These early annunciations of intentionally abstract images may portray an awareness of time and processes of growth that situates human becoming in a sequence of natural phenomenon, rather than the determined apex of these forces.

Footnote: The short video “Neanderthal: The First Artist” by Thibaud Marchand offers an overview of this story. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fHzbsfBfUo8