The Cave Art Paintings of the Cosquer Cave

Prehistoric Images and Medicines Under the Sea

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by Jean Clottes, Jean Courtin, Luc Vanrell

A few facts must be recalled before presenting our new discoveries. The Cosquer Cave (Marseille, France) was discovered in 1985 by a diver, Henri Cosquer, deep under the sea (the original entrance is about 115 feet below present-day sea level) but its paintings were not mentioned until 1991 after three divers died in the cave when they got lost.

The gallery slopes up for about 360 feet under water before reaching a huge chamber that partly remained above the sea and where many prehistoric paintings and engravings are preserved on the walls, as well as remains on the ground (charcoal from fires and torches, a few flint tools). This is the only painted cave in the world with an entrance below present-day sea level where cave art has been preserved from the flooding that occurred when the seas rose after the end of the last glaciation (Clottes & Courtin 1994, 1996).

Photo Luc Vanrell

Right from the start, it was obvious that the discovery of the Cosquer Cave was both an important and original art find. It was located in a provence of France near Marseilles, an area where no Palaeolithic art had ever been discovered. This highlighted a supposedly well-known but rarely referred to problem, which is the disappearance of uncounted prehistoric caves under the sea all along the Mediterranean and other shores since Ice Age times. Several large caves are next to Cosquer. A number of them could have been - and probably were - lived in, painted or engraved.

Despite the destructions due to the sea, Cosquer ranks among the few caves where more than 150 animal figures have been found.

Hand stencils now total 65, the highest number in Europe except for Gargas (Hautes-Pyrénées) and possibly El Castillo in Spain. They are all located in the east side of the chamber, with one in the south. None is in the west. Right at the brink of a 57 feet deep vertical shaft – a location which in itself is significant - they are all black. On other panels, they may be black or red. One positive red hand has been found. A number of hand stencils have been scratched or painted over with dots and bars.


Photo Jean Clottes		Photo Luc Vanrell		Photo Jean Clottes

Photo Jean Clottes

Only adult hand stencils have been found. Many of them have incomplete fingers: they were realized by bending the fingers. Hand stencils with incomplete fingers had until very recently only been found in very few caves, mostly in the Pyrénées (Gargas, Tibiran, Fuente del Trucho). Now, we know that the phenomenon was far more widely represented than had been thought. The now established fact that roughly at the same time such hand stencils were being made in sites hundreds of miles apart should deal a death blow to the theory of pathologic mutilations: how likely would it be that human groups living at such distances from one another should independently develop the same crippling diseases and should react in the same way by immortalizing them on the walls of the caves by means of the same techniques?