Flutings inside Rouffignac cave shed new light

Millennia-old lines on the walls of a French cave provide the first evidence that women, too, left their mark.

Line markings in Rouffignac

Leslie Van Gelder lies on her back in the greasy clay, torch  pointed upwards at the low roof of one chamber of a labyrinthine cave system called Rouffignac, in the Dordogne region of the South of France. She has callipers, rulers, notes and a camera. Above her, surrounding her, on the roof and walls of this cavern are lines made by human hands more than 13,000 years ago.

In other parts of this 8km cave system are spectacular renderings of mammoth, horse and bison (the cave system is otherwise known as the cave of 100 mammoths). But here in this particular room are simply these complex striations. They had been called “macaroni” by French archaeologists, “serpentines” or “meanders” by others.

Finally the nomenclature settled on a more lyrical term: flutings, fingers tracing down, fluting across and around the cave walls and ceilings. Were they a code? Some form of writing? Over the course of several years’ research, Van Gelder and her late husband, New Zealand professor Kevin Sharpe, came up with many possibilities, but the most likely is that these lines, loops, shapes and fingered forms were often the product of play.

Play, because what Van Gelder and Sharpe discovered was not only were the flutings made by men (as previously supposed), or women, for that matter, but the forensic evidence of the myriad hands and fingers revealed they were also made by children.

Right hand, left hand, a child’s hand so high on the cave wall the five-year-old girl (the age and gender of the children can be determined with reasonable scientific probability) had to be sitting on her mother’s hip, or on her father’s shoulder, all three delighting in the tactile sensation of the “moonmilk”, the soft, wet limestone lining of the cave walls. Pure and simple, perhaps it was finger painting.

“It’s so tactile, the moonmilk or soft clay, you want to touch it. It’s that thing where you have to put your hands in your pockets,” Van Gelder explains. “A lot of my work is about not touching things.

“Certainly for the children it must have been the sensual pleasure of it. There’s one whole chamber and the kids have fluted all over it, and why not?”

When Van Gelder and Sharpe’s discoveries were first published in 2006, the archaeological world sat up. Until then the museum dioramas had been created from bones, arrowheads, weapons and various fossilised remains. What Sharpe and Van Gelder had found was a portal into a time beyond the last ice age where one could actually envisage the individuals alive and engaging; that in this hunter-gatherer society the family unit took time out to meander for 45 minutes into the heart of a cave system – not to sleep or inhabit the depths of the caves (that was for the hibernating bears), but to paint, to tell stories and, dare we suppose, to play.

“To me, it paints this really lively picture. In one of the caves we kept finding this man, woman and child fluting. And you think, well, maybe they were just here and it was a rainy day, and they were seeking shelter, and he was drawing pictures to amuse the son,” she recounts. “I get the sense of a family unit that has never really ever been proposed. It’s always been this sole preserve of men, this iconoclastic ‘I’m going off to the caves to paint’ sort of thing. Instead the whole family came; it normalised it.”

A world away from the dark, damp recesses of the French caves, Van Gelder – funny, warm and effervescent – sits on the deck of her home, eyes drawn up the Dart and Rees river valleys near Glenorchy, at the head of Lake Wakatipu. She laughs when she recalls her first question to the agent when viewing the property: “How’s the broadband connection?” Manhattan-born Van Gelder travels for up to two months of the year to the South of France, makes at least one trip to the US and spends the rest of the time working remotely, with laptop, a warm chair and a fine view.

She compares the small community of Glenorchy to that of the hunter-gatherer groups – large enough to be efficient in scale, small enough to look out for one another. She should know. She arrived here shortly after her husband died of cancer. Sharpe is still very much present in the house – books, photographs and papers strewn around the office and living space. His life’s work – bridging the chasm between science and religion – was original, rigorous and controversial. Born in New Plymouth (as a child he would swim downstream of the Ivan Watkins-Dow chemical plant, another story), he won academic accolades through school and university, finally heading to Harvard and Oxford, notching up one doctorate after another. But his other passion was archaeology; he studied flutings in Australia before finally gaining permission to enter the Rouffignac caves, in the South of France, in 2001.

Van Gelder’s path was equally circuitous. The daughter of an Indiana Jones-like biologist father, who had accompanied  him to Africa on study trips since the age of four, Van Gelder came to archaeology via literature and a PhD on the study of cultures and their relationship to place. She met Sharpe in 2000, and together they embarked on the exploration of Rouffignac.

She describes her first foray to the cave flutings. It’s a 40-minute walk, part crawl, into Rouffignac’s heart, bison and mammoth images passing by in the fleeting torchlight. Finally a pause, and the light scanned the roof of a chamber.
“Overwhelming.” At this point no previous archaeologist had any idea they were made by children. “There was so much energy, so much motion, as if you were watching children at a party and the only thing you could see was their hands in the air. Heart-stopping.”

It would be another few years until they could confirm that many of the panels were indeed made by children. Measuring the width of the finger marks, they compared them with a wide sample of children alive today. From skeletal information they knew that the population over 13,000 years ago was comparable to that today, if not taller (living as they did on a high-protein diet).

More interesting was determining gender. This was done by measuring the relative heights of the three middle fingers at the start of each fluting. In females, the ring finger is more likely to be shorter than the index finger, the opposite generally being the case in males. Over the course of the research they were then able to identify individuals, observing that one particular five-year-old girl, for example, was the most prolific.

“She goes to creative places,” Van Gelder begins, talking in the present tense as if the cave is a time capsule, telescoping the millennia. “She’s up on shoulders or hips. She doesn’t mark over anyone else’s markings. She’s very polite that way. She has some concept of where to be and where not to be. But she’s always there, in every chamber. And you think: so, if we’re right that she’s female, we know there’s no prohibition on girls exploring. These girls are safe enough to go wandering, they’re not lost in the dark, because there are not lots of drag lines that you would do if you didn’t know where you were. And this five-year-old girl flutes with both hands, she’s not holding a torch. So who is?”

What rocked the archaeological community, and what many, astonishingly, still don’t accept, was Sharpe and Van Gelder’s discovery that within the caves were the hands of women. Somehow, until this time, the accepted wisdom of cave art specialists was that only men would have ventured into the dark recesses. Van Gelder describes one of the first caves they studied, assigning identification numbers to each individual set of hands.

“We went to look at the tops of the hands, and it was female, female, female, and I said, ‘Oh God, please let there be a male here somewhere or the research will be co-opted by every women’s group in the Western world!’ Mercifully, there were a few men,” she laughs. “I didn’t believe it was a women’s thing only, or a men’s thing only, because in a hunter-gatherer society it makes more sense. You don’t leave the kids out with a babysitter. You travel as your group. And in a way that was really wonderful to see.”

Etchings in Rouffignac Cave

Sharpe – mathematician and theologian – came to the flutings with the idea that here was a form of early writing. He wanted to try to decipher meaning from the walls. But they settled on asking the questions that were answerable, figuring out how the flutings were made, and perhaps by whom. The rest would only ever be conjecture. Van Gelder’s favourite theory is much of the fluting might be some kind of storytelling, or hands moving to dance or song.

“Some of the biggest panels of art are in places where the acoustics are extraordinary, the sort of place you can feel the vibrations when people are talking. You get this feeling of ‘who wouldn’t sing in this space, let alone dance?’” Some of the most curious aspects of the flutings are the “tectiforms”, shapes created within each panel, unique to each individual. Some echo the lines of a rudimentary hut. Another (by the five-year-old girl) comprises vertical lines made with a sweep of fingers, then drawn across horizontally. Sharpe and Van Gelder agreed these must have been a kind of signature.

“Everyone we’ve identified in Rouffignac has done at least one tectiform. One individual male did six, and some of them are very ornate.” Is this a form of early writing? Van Gelder answers carefully. “It’s human to make a mark. It’s human to have a system by which you can communicate. So why wouldn’t they?”

Ironically, for years archaeologists had walked past the flutings, en route to the celebrated mammoths, bison or horse. But as Van Gelder points out, what the cave paintings of animals can tell you is what the artist used to paint with, and where they stood. Here, within the flutings, was the touch of a human hand, and not just one, but a child’s hand in relation to an adult, or another child, making his or her mark or telling a story, often over and over. As Van Gelder says, “You can almost hear them talking, laughing, it brings the people themselves back into three dimensions.”

By humanising the artists and their motivation, however, she also risks bringing the flutings into the realm of the mundane. Cave art is often perceived as somehow sacred. As the art has survived 13,000- 32,000 years, shut away in a shrine-like cave as civilisations and ice ages came and went, the danger is ascribing more meaning to it than the artist ever intended. Van Gelder prefers to simply acknowledge the individuals concerned.

“In the simplest of ways, the flutings let me bring their humanity back to them, because I can know them by their hands, their movements, their relationships, their idiosyncrasies, the very small moments of their lives. Studying the caves and the people who were there all that time ago is a way of honouring them.”

Sharpe and Van Gelder worked together on the flutings until close to his death in 2008. Three years on, Van Gelder continues the study with the help of a Cambridge doctoral student. Although the study of the Rouffignac cave is complete, she hopes to gain permission to enter more caves in France, in Spain and perhaps one day in Australia. Despite losing her husband, Van Gelder is impelled to continue to fathom those whose hands traced the underground walls millennia ago, for no other reason than to answer those “answerable questions”. As to the “why”, she grins and shrugs, pointing to the impulse in us all, particularly as children, simply to draw.

“In a way it’s a legacy of being human that says that we have been people who create, people who explore, people who go into dark places and shine a little light, and in that little patch of light we bring a vision of the world in with us.”