Eurasian Cave Lion

The Chauvet artists painted animals that do not appear in later cave art traditions or that appear only rarely as marginal figures, background presences, footnotes to the dominant horses and bison and aurochs of the younger sites.

In Chauvet, Cave lions take centre stage.

They are depicted in groups, not solitary predators, but social animals, shown in what appears to be coordinated hunting behaviour.

Their bodies low, their heads forward, their musculature rendered with an anatomical precision that suggests the artists had studied living lions closely, and understood their movement and their physical structure from direct observation.

It was deep in the interior, a low, narrow section of cave far from the entrance, far from daylight, far from the painted galleries where the artistic activity took place.

What was a child doing there?

What was a child doing deep in a cave system in the Orin Yashin winter, in a landscape inhabited by cave lions and woolly rhinoceroses and cave bears, carrying a torch, walking beside an animal, moving through a darkness so complete that the loss of the torch would mean total blindness? and almost certain death.

Was the child exploring? Was the child on an errand? Was the child undergoing some kind of ritual or initiation guided through the dark by an adult who left no footprints in that particular stretch of clay? The questions are unanswerable.