September 2022

The darkness was absolute. The air was cool and clammy. The small train rattled on, swaying as it went around curves, passengers clutching the rails of the open carriages. Suddenly it stopped. There was silence for a moment and then lights flashed on, dazzling us for a moment after the blackness, and our guide started speaking in heavily-accented English, asking us to leave the train.

We were far underground in the huge cave system of Rouffignac in SW France, sometimes called “La Grotte des Cent Mammouths” (the Cave of the Hundred Mammoths). We walked carefully through the roughly-levelled passages in dim light. From time to time the guide asked us to stop, and turned on lights to illuminate one side of the chamber we were passing through. The limestone walls were covered with drawings of animals, mostly mammoths, engravings or bold outlines in black made by prehistoric hunters of thirteen centuries ago, at the end of the last Ice Age.

There have been suggestions that some or even all of the Rouffignac drawings are not authentic, although it seems that most are now accepted as genuine. The cave has been a UNESCO World Heritage Site since 1979. It was used for clay extraction in the 15^th century, and a 16^th century writer mentioned that he saw paintings in several places there. It first drew the attention of archaeologists in the 19^th century.

There are frozen mammoths preserved in the permafrost of Siberia and North America so we know what they looked like, although they became extinct thousands of years ago. Most died out at the end of the last cold period of the Ice Age 10,000 years ago, although a few small isolated populations survived until around 4,000 years ago.  The drawings at Rouffignac are accurate and give all the details of their adaptation to extreme cold: the humps of fat on the top of their heads and on their shoulders, the long sweeping hair of their outer coat, the two finger-like ends of their trunks, the massive tusks. They are so well drawn that they almost seem alive, especially if they had been seen by flickering torchlight by men who had crawled for ages through silent darkness to reach them.

To this day we do not know the reason for the drawings in Ice Age caves. How can we, since they were made millennia before the first writing? We cannot know what people believed unless they explain it in words. It seems likeliest that they were something to do with hunting magic.

I was lucky to see Rouffignac in the 1970s, before the flood of tourists had caused such damage to all of the prehistoric caves that the number of visits had to be restricted, or in some cases such as Lascaux, entirely discontinued. Increased light, heat and moisture encourage mould growth. If you want to see the mammoths today, you have to get up early and queue for tickets.