Stephen Phelan

The auroch, the mammoth, and the steppe bison have long since gone extinct, but their painted likenesses still look relatively fresh across the walls and roofs of Altamira. Or, so they were described to me by Diego Garate Madaigan, who is one of the very few humans now allowed to enter that exalted cave in Northern Spain. I envied him for this and other reasons.

A professor of prehistory and paleolithic art at the University of Cantabria, Garate said he’d been inside Altamira as recently as the week before, furthering his lifelong investigations of the prepwork, tools, lighting schemes and methodologies developed by early homo sapiens painters. He preferred to concentrate on what he called “the technical aspects of rock art production”, as opposed to the aesthetic or semiotic studies that had driven other scholars to distraction, in his view.

Some 34,000 years ago, our distant ancestors began making frescoes with chiaroscuro effects through that suite of subterranean vaults, which remained in use for many millennia, until the cavemouth was sealed up tight behind an intervening rockfall. The best part of a geological epoch passed before a curious gun dog clawed its way across the threshold in 1868, leading a succession of witnesses into the first such prehistoric gallery ever seen by modern eyes.

Landowner and amateur archaeologist Marcelino Sanz de Sautuola is generally credited with the discovery, though the story goes that his young daughter Maria pointed out the painted animals to him. The sheer technique on display seemed much too sophisticated for troglodytic numbskulls, as pre-civilised people were then assumed to be, and the whole thing was initially declared a hoax by self-appointed experts from France. Those accusers were to look pretty stupid when similar caves were found in their own country, but their mea culpa came too late for Sanz ​de Sautuola, who had died in the meantime under lingering suspicion of fraud. On his later visit, Pablo Picasso appraised the art with a quote for the ages: “After Altamira, all is decadence.”

The site was opened to the public and eventually closed again, as a century or so of gaping admiration revealed the paint-stripping effects of moisture and carbon monoxide from the breath of too many beholders. A replica cave, with replica artworks, was created next door, diverting tourists to a near-exact copy. Today, only Garate and other select professors have access to the original sanctuary.

His specialism requires close attention to the etching, or “pecking”, where the artists used flint blades to outline figures on the rock before applying their ochre and charcoal. Altamira is so rare and precious, he told me, because those reds and blacks are still so solid and vivid (albeit not as lustrous as they must have looked in Stone Age firelight). The colours were preserved, as if in tupperware, by the near-quarantine conditions of that specific cave.

Many rock art sites have since been discovered, across the north of Spain and south of France. The corresponding branch of learning, still less than two centuries old, has lately proposed that our ancestors painted their way across Western Europe, and what we now know as “cave art” is only what survived on the deepest, darkest surfaces they touched. Luck, and geology, left us a few great sanctuaries on the scale of Altamira, and a preponderance of others where the pigments are long gone from the walls – eaten by creeping bacteria, effaced by sheets of calcite, scoured away by air and water flowing through the system. All that remains in most cases are vestigial chisel marks, tracing the legs and horns and tusks of beasts that were once common as cattle to those who hunted them, but are now as dead as dinosaurs to us. Like the “shadow pictures” sometimes detected by X-rays beneath the weave of canvases by Titian or Caravaggio, these proto-images are very hard to see without expert intervention.

So I went to the Basque Country, where the recent search for such apparitions has stirred “a little revolution”, by Garate’s reckoning. He should know, being the main instigator. He is also a native, born and bred in that region (or nation, for those who believe the Basque Country to be not-Spain). He lives with his wife and kids in the same small estuary town, Plenzia, where he grew up. My ideal tour guide, if overqualified, to the netherworld below his home turf.

The day we met, Doctor Garate presented as adventure-ready. Face stubbled, hair short enough for the army; a wiry, handsome guy in very good shape for early middle age, wearing tactical trousers with padded knees. He picked me up in a messy hatchback that doubled as a locker for his caving gear, and we drove over the kind of mountain road that can quickly make a note-taking passenger carsick. It was a sunny morning in mid-May, springtime near the coastal edge of Vizcaya province, a green zone of cliffs and valleys dropping into the Atlantic.

I live in Madrid but I love it up there. The particular roll of that land and seascape rings a bell with the Irish, maybe. All that rain and drama. Nice and bright today though, a battery-charging jolt of solar power before we went into the dark. En route, Garate told me tales from what I want to call chthonian folk history. He said that some parishioners, persistently or residually pagan, will even now report the odd sighting of the Basque goddess Mari, who surveys her domain by flying cave-to-cave. Visitations from her Christian namesake the Virgin Mary are not unknown in these parts either, usually in the vicinity of a cave. And while ETA was still active, armed paramilitary units favoured certain caves for use as hideouts, weapons caches, or hostage-keeping quarters.

Politically speaking, certain parties may yet consider the Basque Country a wholly separate state from Cantabria, the neighbouring “autonomous community” on the present map of Spanish administrative divisions. Geomorphically though, the Basque Mountains form part of the Cantabrian Range, which reaches all the way east to meet the Pyrenees across a karstic topography of soft, porous limestone, honeycombed with abysses.

There is iron, lead, copper, gold and silver running through the bedrock, and the ancients mined them all. Red marble too, and Garate pointed out the Ereño quarry as we passed, from which the stone was sourced to build stairs and fountains at the Vatican. Within his own field, however, the Basque Country had seemed until recently a conspicuous blank spot between Europe’s densest clusters of painted caves. This made no sense to Garate or his faculty colleagues at their centre of excellence for rock art research in Santander. About 15 years ago, they advanced a theory that the undersides of this entire contiguous landscape were once lavishly decorated with pictograms and petroglyphs, which slow, steady entropic forces had since made barely visible to the untrained eye.

“Back then, there were only three of us in my department,” said Garate. “And we would each need three lifetimes to explore all those caves.” So, they consulted, enlisted, and effectively deputised a task force from the Union of Basque Spelologists. Garate himself is a card-carrying member of that association, comprised mainly of hobbyists who can also be quite purist, or classicist, about their chosen sport and pastime. Which is to say that many union brothers (and a few sisters) believe in cave exploration for its own sake. They will tend to assert a territorial right of way through the subsurface, and experience tells them to mistrust interlopers with other agendas.

One recent example: there was conflict beneath Errenteria, up near the French border, when biologists petitioned the Basque government to help protect a resident bat colony, and that habitat was ruled off-limits to humans. Much the same happened, in the same community, when prehistoric engravings and clay bas-reliefs, up to 27,000 years old, were later discovered through a series of chambers called Aizpitarte. Ipso facto, what had long been a playground for local cavers was shut down to everyone except duly authorised academics.

Garate understood both cohorts, and the tension between them. He embodied it, in his way. He appealed to the pride and curiosity of fellow spelunkers by proposing that their exhaustive charts of local cave networks might also serve as treasure maps; that they may have already climbed or crawled past inestimable wonders in the dark, because they didn’t know what to look for, or even how to look. A handful of volunteers said they were willing to learn.

Something akin to the deep-core rig workers in the movie Armageddon – a rocketful of roughnecks shot into space to drill through an asteroid – union crews were re-trained to operate under scientific parameters. The college boys taught them to angle their head torches a certain way, adjust their gazes just so. And like messages appearing in shower-steam on a bathroom mirror, ghost portraits of prehistoric animals began to reveal themselves all over (and under) the Basque Country. Garate himself had found more than his share,, including two bison and a horse abiding in faded stains of ochre at Mount Lumentxa.

We drove around that mountain now, and down into the village of Lekeitio, an old fishing port between the Bay of Biscay and the Lea River. That setting has the sort of geographical charisma that brings on pangs of longing – ridgeline rows of holm oaks and beeches rising over a grassy estuary, with rearward stacks of limestone secreting many other caves. One of these, Armintxe, had sheltered civilians while German warplanes dropped blast-bombs on nearby Gernika in 1937. But nobody noticed the panels at the back of that gallery (the lexica of art and archaeology have certain keywords in common) until 2016. There in a forgotten corner were more wild horses, ibex, and steppe bison, as well as two ochre-tinted lions – rare and unlikely specimens to be etched on these walls, in this part of the world, at the tail end of the last ice age.

Garate wanted to show me somewhere else. Below the Armintxe cave, closer to sea level, construction of a residential building had opened a crack in that same mass of rock. Inside was a cavity that, as far as anyone could tell, no human had ever set foot in. Finding no prints, no bones, no signs of ingress and certainly no artworks, Garate and his team designated it as a “clean” cave and put it to use as a proving ground for field experiments. Named Isuntza after the nearest beach, it was now a “laboratory” where multi-disciplinary researchers could test their theories in optimal conditions.

From the boot of the car he passed me out a mining helmet with a headlamp, and took a chunky key to open a low metal gateway at the base of the cliff. We bent ourselves into a limestone crawlspace and followed it for about 20 feet until we could stand upright in a wider, higher chamber occupied by PhD students at assorted work stations. Their lights and cameras made it look like a movie set. Glowing readouts on laptop screens and phone apps tracked moisture and temperature levels in real time; plotted the contours of the cave for 3D and virtual reality models; registered changes in the colour metrics of pigments applied to the surfaces. Within alcoves, behind pillars, over bedding planes, they had painted crude approximations of the abstract geometric shapes and archetypal figures seen at rock art sites across Europe, Africa, and Australia.

The general idea, said Garate, was to reverse-engineer the processes of prehistoric image-making. To unpack the practical, mechanical decisions of the artists (as distinct from creative, expressive intentions that can only be supposed) was to better understand their skillset, their knowledge base, their means and modes of communication. One project focused on the adhesive properties of charcoal when mixed with water at certain ratios. Another gauged the “luminous intensity” and “radius of action” achieved by burning different woods and fats to light the cave. Their last live test with flaming torches had generated so much smoke that the whole team had to get the hell out.

My beam was now directed to something like an art installation, where many handprints had been made with the stencil effects by which our ancestors left their signatures at Altamira, and elsewhere. Garate had assisted with this experiment too, using bird bones as blowpipes to spray shading bursts of ochre around his palm and fingers, or filling his mouth with the stuff to spit it back out as prototypal splatter-paint. “How did it taste?” I asked him.

“Terrible, disgusting,” he said. “And when you work with ochre it stays on your skin and clothes for days.” Some Namibian ethnic groups still slather their bodies in that clay, and early human tribes may have done the same, which could account for the red smears that archaeologists kept finding though the narrowest passages of decorated caves. Averse to extrapolation, Garate said he was less inclined than others to draw conclusions along those lines.

Another of the handprints belonged to Belgian PhD candidate Olga Spaey, whose studies brought her here from Bordeaux-Montaine University. When I spoke to Spaey later, I marvelled that such a poignant little souvenir of her existence might still be on that wall in 37,000 years – which is roughly how long ago that a seeming congregation of 77 children, adolescents and adults pressed their palms against a low ceiling in a cave called El Castillo, also in Cantabria. “Or it might be gone in a few weeks,” she said. (Weeping water down the rock had already erased some of the samples in the test cave.)

Spaey’s subject of interest was the “spatial relationships” between the placements of handprints at sites like El Castillo, and the contrast they suggested between “public and private motives”. Within these extensive cave systems, occupied at different periods by discrete paleolithic groups, the evidence points to a clear separation of dwelling areas from exhibition spaces.

They lived in one place, at or near the surface, while making and showing their artworks in some other, remoter chamber that was still roomy and accessible enough for social or communal gatherings. But solo artists also ventured even further underground, to plant single spectral hands in the deepest, most difficult reaches of the cave. Such behaviour showed real speleological daring, and ardent, if obscure, symbolic purpose.

“I do believe that rock art was kind of religious,” said Spaey. Quite a blunt statement, I thought, despite the mild qualifier. A popular hypothesis too, I gather, and a common opinion among researchers in this field. But it also sounded a little hollow to me and especially in the context of the test cave, which was broadly designed to work out how the art was made. The why went beyond the scope of enquiry. For my part I’d been straining not to ask this of Garate. I admired and aspired to his dogged, rugged style of empiricism. He did not guess, if he could help it. He didn’t let his mind reel. Or that’s how I read him, at least, while relating more to Spaey in her apparent mystification.

As she put it to me, the imagination becomes a double bind in these studies – a reflex response to fathomless timescales that is also wholly inadequate to cover the distance between then and now, or them and us. “It’s hard enough to imagine antiquity, and that’s only 2000 years ago,” she said. “All we can do is try to look back through the glasses of our own time, but it’s just too far.”

Ultramodern tech at their disposal could now model changes in the cave over millenia, and bring the science ever-closer to “seeing” the remote past through this theoretical portal. To Spaey, each resulting projection or simulation only produced more data to sift, consider, and usually discard.

“We keep gathering more information, and I sometimes think we’re losing sight of what we’re looking for. The quest for meaning, you could say.” I thought I heard a little sadness here, her English accented and a touch poeticised by Belgian-French inflection.

“I love caves,” she said. “It’s my favourite thing, to be inside them. They take you out of life, out of time, into this complete darkness. They are dangerous. You could die. But that’s a very human feeling, to be cold, to be scared, to be listening out for noises. It’s quite a primal thing. So in that strange environment maybe we go back to basic stuff we share with earlier human beings.”

I liked the sound of this too, but I was trying to be cool, like Doctor Garate, who now led me back out of the Isuntza cave and into another called Atxurra – a place just up the road where he had personally discovered engravings that qualified, as he put it, for “the Champions League of rock art.”

****

Ranking at or near the top of that league is surely Lascaux, the most famous painted cave of all. I’d been there with my family a few years prior, albeit only to the replica version in a visitor centre just outside the French village of Montignac. The original cave was discovered by a group of local boys and a dog named Robot in 1940. Crowds followed even in wartime to wonder at its vivid pictorial stampedes of bulls, stags, and extinct or imaginary predators.

The whole menagerie was blighted by mildew within a couple of decades, so today’s crowds are given reproductions to admire in fabricated galleries of modern resin and reinforced concrete. It was hard to pick up whatever uncanny frequency I’d been hoping to receive there. Other punters propped their elbows in my neck to photograph the duplicated art, while my daughter dragged me onward to the gift shop.

I didn’t want to be solipsistic about it, so I had to allow that at least some of these people must be feeling more or less the same as me. My own interest in cave art had been growing as I got older and glummer. The earliest expressions of our civilisation seemed to gain relevancy, and poignancy, the closer we were coming to the end of it. I had a general, justifiable dread of the future, coupled with the maudlin apprehensions of a man in midlife.

Online chatter informed me that men of this vintage spend inordinate portions of their day thinking about the Roman Empire, but that period was too late for my liking. I looked for consolation to deep time and subterranean space. My daughter, then just shy of five, was the biggest worry and the best remedy. She cheered me up with her own interpretation of the human evolutionary basics, which collapsed our entire chain of species inheritance into a single anthropomorphic figure that she called “my monkey grandma”. Her monkey grandma, needless to say, had painted the cave of Lascaux.

At the gift shop I bought her a sabre-tooth tiger, and myself a copy of Jared Diamond’s book The Third Chimpanzee: The Evolution and Future of the Human Animal. Fitting holiday reading for the banks of the River Dordogne, an area so rich in rock art because it had formed a fertile tract between the glaciers that still covered much of Europe in the prime of the Magdalenian people (named after the cliffside shelter where they left behind a trove of artefacts at Abri de la Madeleine, a little further along the Dordogne).

Diamond identified that culture as the apex of what he called “The Great Leap Forward”, a relatively sudden flourishing of human capacity and creativity that he attributed mostly to our newfound grasp of spoken language around 40,000 years ago. The Magdalenians came around 25,000 years or so after that, their refinement apparent at Lascaux and elsewhere. Later, when the ice melted, all those unfrozen meadowlands gave rise to the co-called agricultural revolution, and our deliberate shift from hunter-gathering nomadism to settled societies.

Diamond declared this “the worst mistake in the history of the human race”, estranging us from our natural context while bending us toward leader-worship, hierarchy, avarice, coercion, and xenophobic violence. The gist of it was that we let ourselves fall terminally out of balance well before the rise of the Romans, the Nazis, or the internet. I sat by the river trying to rank my personal top five of the biggest mistakes in human history. Fossil fuel extraction? Splitting the atom? (Dynamic pricing systems for concert ticket sales?) The logic of the text suggested that climate change and nuclear weapons were also baked into our fate from that one decisive moment in the twilight of the Stone Age.

Pioneered by primatologist Christopher Boehme, and popularised by Diamond et al circa 1990, this rueful school of hindsight has since turned out a lot of like-minded mainstream nonfiction. I find it compelling enough, but I’m a credulous consumer of such material, quite easily persuaded by the last thing I read on the subject. A stack of books about prehistory might be arranged into chronological layers, like geological strata, with distinct lines of thought corresponding to discrete time periods and their prevailing politics, academic fashions, recent revelations in the field. At every phase, Hobbes and Rousseau are recast in a new light, as the ascendent view favours one or the other of their contending claims for early human life: hellish struggle, or Edenic harmony.

We’ve been leaning toward the latter for a while now. It tends to look like the leftist angle, with its inklings of a pre-capitalist cooperative. (Though it wouldn’t take much of a push to reinterpret the orderly tribal society as an optimal right-wing template either.) I could align myself pretty easily with the late anthropologist David Graeber, and the idea that certain bands of cave-dwellers comported themselves as more productive, effective anarchists than anyone who came to identify as such when the word itself was invented.

This is not to say that he was buying the story of our species as sold to us these past few decades, in which homo sapiens walks out of Africa, outpaces various hominid rivals – Neanderthals, Denisovians, Homo Naledi – lives free and well for 200,000 years, then spoils it all in a misguided hurry to get civilised.
“Running towards our chains,” as Graeber characterised this thesis in The Dawn of Everything, co-written with the archaeologist David Wengrow. Together, they cut against and across the general direction of travel in recent scholarship, rearranging the scant and scattered evidence to present human progress as a wild mess of trial and error with cycles or spells of comparative grace.

Crafts and cave art discovered in Kenya and Sulawesi, for example, show signs of complex cultural activity at times and places very far removed from those allowed by our frankly Eurocentric pre-historiography so far. Europe may even have been “late to the party”, as the authors have it with a cheeky hint of irony, given that the universities of this continent have funded and dominated the bulk of related research. But for all that hard work digging in the dirt, we still have very little to show for it. A few broken teeth or tool fragments are sometimes all we can extract from oceanic passages of time. Any attempt to plot a neat narrative line through that chronology means skipping over gigantic gaps in the record, even while the urge to do so might be the single constant thread.

This tendency to make up stories about our origins “started to crystallise in deep prehistory”, wrote Graeber and Wengrow. It’s a human trait, and we can’t help it. And yet we still don’t really know who or what we’re talking about when we speak of the first people, or whether we can even think of “them” as “us”. The two Davids could only propose that we might at least have “self-conciousness” in common. To the best of our knowledge their brains were no smaller, their intelligence no lesser. Perhaps not an unforgivable stretch, then, to envision them as “equally perceptive, equally confused”.

I got that book for Christmas a few years ago, Graeber having died suddenly of necrotic pancreatitis the year before publication. Already sympathetic to his politics, I was probably even more disposed to agree with him because it was the last thing he wrote. A parting word on humankind, from a clever specimen I had respected. Likewise The Humanoid Stain, a wonderful essay by author and activist Barbara Ehrenreich before her death in 2022. Contemplating the oldest human art, she observed that animals were often represented with reverential detail, while human forms hardly featured on cave walls, and looked like hapless stick figures when they did – cartoons confused by their own erections.

Regarding their place in the food chain, the painters could not be said to take this species very seriously. “They were meat,” wrote Ehrenreich, “and they also seemed to know that they knew they were meat. And that, if you think about it long enough, is almost funny.” She was half-kidding herself, maybe, answering whatever humour she detected in those cave paintings with her own wit – an artistic response to art, more instinctive than what you might call instructive.
We don’t see ourselves that way any more, concluded Ehrenreich. We have lost that ability to laugh at ourselves.

“And I strongly suspect that we will not survive the mass extinction we have prepared for ourselves, unless we too finally get the joke.” This also sounded right to me when I read it. I had formed a picture in my mind of the archaic past as a moon shining on the doomed planet of the present.

I could still conceive of existence as a horror show of peril and confusion for the Magdalenians in their time. Death came early for all of them, whether pitilessly slow or speechlessly quick. But I envied them as well. Piling on through book after book about their “lifeworld”, to use Edmund Husserl’s lovely quasi-portmanteau, I pined for the greenness and abundance of their Earth as they spread slowly across it on foot, at a rate of a few miles per generation. They had it all in front of them, those tunic-wearing bastards.

They were absolute fiends for the hallucinogens too, or so I learned from South African archaeologist David Lewis-Williams in The Mind in the Cave, a famously outré analysis that drew upon the rituals of native San people (also known as Bushmen), and lab experiments on psychogenic agents. Consider, if you will, that the human brain on drugs, in deepest darkness, or behind closed eyelids, will create visual effects known as entopic phenomena, conjuring shapes and patterns – dots, lines, zigzags, coronas – that also appear in recurring motifs of tribal art, from contemporary South Africa to the Upper Paleolithic caves of Western Europe. Lewis-Williams made the case that neuropsychological phenomena can be interpreted as portents or portals by shamanic cosmology, sending a culture far underground to paint or carve those floating forms right onto the boundary walls of their spirit world.

Down there in the blackness they will also project images of animals they hunt in waking life and dreams alike. And while they’re at it, they’ll ingest substances and perform ritual dances to induce trance states and blur the edges of reality. “Holy shit,” you may think, as I did, but a lot of archaeologists really hate this hypothesis. I heard the subject raised on Melvyn Bragg’s BBC Radio show In Our Time, and a guest professor from Durham University was practically hooting with derision.

Soon after this, I happened to meet the eminent Israeli prehistorian Ran Barkai, who was entirely convinced by Lewis-Williams, and a little peeved by that opposing strain of British scholarship. “Many of them seem to think it’s not respectful to suggest that primitive homo sapiens were getting stoned or entering altered states of consciousness,” Barkai told me.

“It’s almost like they want the homo sapiens to be a serious guy, wearing a suit and doing everything properly. They see a direct connection between rock art and the British Museum, or the Louvre.” It was Barkai who first told me about the Atxurra cave in October of 2024, when I was up in the Basque Country on a reporting assignment. We started talking at the Urdaibai Bird Centre, an avian museum and monitoring station on a rewilded salt marsh between the Oka River and the Bay of Biscay. I was there to write about the place as a gentle and viable model for nature tourism, presently threatened by a more invasive kind.

The facility was a former cannery now styled as an “international airport for birds”, with a viewing platform like an ATC tower. Arrivals and Departures boards checked off the species stopping to rest there on their long-haul autumnal migrations from Northern Europe to sub-Saharan Africa. But the peace of this habitat would soon be disturbed by construction of a new Guggenheim Museum at a disused shipyard near the river mouth. Proceeding despite near-unanimous local opposition, it would serve as a provincial annex of the Frank Gehry-designed art space that had helped revive the fortunes of the nearest big city, Bilbao.

Late in the season, there were only a few of us staying in the simple lodgings provided at the centre for birdwatchers and ornithologists. But Professor Barkai was no more of a twitcher than I was. He came only for the rock art. And having just spent a full day spelunking to paleolithic engravings a long way inside the Atxurra cave, he now sat overtired and overstimulated on a low couch in the visitor lounge, both of us facing a window wall the size of a cinema screen.

It was a field trip, he said, for his work in the archaeology department of Tel Aviv University. I confessed my own curiosity as a layman, and mentioned that I’d recently finished The Mind in the Cave. Asked what he thought of it, Barkai seemed properly astonished. He might have done a double-take. To be so casually questioned by a stranger, at such a remote outpost, about a fairly niche study within his particular wheelhouse … but, like Carl Jung, he didn’t really believe in coincidence either. He had just co-written a book (in Hebrew) that mapped Jungian psychoanalysis onto cave art.

In precis: Jung built his concept of the collective unconscious on a dream he had about descending the staircase of a big house. Each level corresponded to a lower, earlier layer of human history, from the 20th century to the Middle Ages, and all the way down to a bedrock floor scattered with the oldest homo sapiens skulls. So, to stand before the images our ancestors made in that basement is to recognise or remember archetypes that were once important to us.

“I believe that we see what they saw in caves,” said Barkai. “Our subconscious is inherited from theirs, and we share the same feelings as they did when entering those spaces.” After a couple of glasses of that Basque white wine, txakoli, I asked if we had let them down, the ones who came before us. (An earlier book of his was titled They Were Here Before Us.)

I mean, they gave us fire, and we went on to incinerate the planet with it. Perhaps he too was getting the feeling that our monkey grandmas would be woefully disappointed with how we turned out? “I don’t think the first homo sapiens would have any expectations of us, or, let’s say, anticipations. But I do believe we have made more mistakes than they did. We lost the connection they had to this world. They led the way quite nicely and successfully, and we got … distracted. We took another path, which is now leading us to a dead end, maybe.” Barkai surprised me too, in that all his erudition had led him back to a Rousseauian conception of early homo sapiens. They had their struggles, no doubt, but he believed they had it better, and easier, than we do.

“It was a picnic for them,” he said. Barkai didn’t like to complain about his own lot, “but things are almost impossible in Israel now,” he told me, answering a question I had not asked. He was lately making things difficult for himself by protesting his own government every weekend. “I feel very happy to be here at this moment,” he said. The marshes and mountains outside the window were bright blue and deep green. We watched ospreys, spoonbills, herons with pterodactyl flight profiles, and many other birds that we couldn’t put names to, all floating down over the tideland.

****

It was Ran Barkai who put me in touch with Diego Garate, who in turn filed a formal application on my behalf, requesting that the Basque government let me into the Atxurra cave. I waited months for a green light. When I eventually got one, Garate said the delay was more likely due to bureaucratic indifference than zealous protection of cultural property.

There’s no money in these caves, he told me on the short drive from Isuntza, so no real investment either, and not much care in terms of maintenance. And when we entered through the iron gate now in place at Atxurra, the handle broke off as soon as he locked it behind us. “I hope we can get out again,” he said, and I laughed because he laughed.

The cave is in a lonely place, easy to miss before a blind corner, just off the high and winding country road between Lekeitio and Markina. It was the building of that road, with explosives and heavy machinery, that opened a mouth in the rock back in the 1880s. The crew went inside to look, and the villagers followed close behind. Surviving accounts say they threw a cave party that first night with lots of booze and music, playing woodwind pipes made from animal horns called albocas – apparently their customary response to discoveries like this.

Amateur explorers, teenage lovers, and football fans had since scrawled names and dates all along the anterior passages. “Stupid graffitis,” Garate called them, as we moved in past tags from 1884, 1902, 1943, 1965. He pointed out claw marks left on the walls by cave bears who went extinct about 26,000 years ago. Deeper into the system we stepped over a phalange bone on the floor from a bear who died here. Many such had been looted, he told me.

Over the last century and a half, professional excavations also yielded reindeer bones, tool fragments, and charcoal residue that marked out an early human living space not far inside the cave, and probably repeat occupations in separate time periods. But no rock art was found in Atxurra until Garate and his colleague Iñaki Intxaurbe came to probe its deepest precincts in 2015.

Later, they would reconstruct the process by which Stone Age pioneers got all the way back there with lighting and painting supplies. They calculated that the inward journey would have taken about 40 minutes for a small team using wooden torches while mobile, and fat-burning lanterns on arrival at their worksite. Our own two-man expedition moved a bit faster, kitted as we were with decent boots and helmet lamps, and a route plan that Garate knew by heart.

Even so, my perception of time started to detach from whatever was measured on my watch. After half an hour or so of constant motion, by my reckoning, I checked to see that it had been about nine minutes. Garate said he never got used to this dimension of spelunking, which could also work the other way. He’d spent busy days in dark that drew out like a full working week, or bivouacked in the belly of a mountain to feel the whole night pass like a siesta.
If he totalled all his hours in caves, like pilots log theirs in flight, he estimated that it might be a couple of years, but memory-wise it seemed like even more of his life. Time bends around black holes, I thought.

The sensation of moving through that space brought to mind an immense and empty city under a monumental power cut. No starlight to compensate, no candles in the windows, only two thin torchbeams sweeping over otherwise unseen streets and structures. Some of the way we had to crawl on our bellies, squeezing heads and arses under spillages of low-hanging rock, wriggling through drifts of wet clay and guano. Other sections required climbing upwards into a void, Garate directing me to safe holds for hands and feet. We proceeded well beyond the easily accessible galleries tagged by casual intruders, into trickier territory known only to serious cavers, though the whole network had been closed for a decade by now; to everyone except credentialed researchers.

I followed Garate faithfully into various dubious apertures, one of which opened out to a wide, high chamber where the air filled with vortices of bats. I was proud of myself until I asked aloud if I might be the first Irishman in history to make it this far. A gauche question, sprung from some odd tribal reflex. “Probably yes,” said Garate, who did not seem to think this was meaningful.
And why should he? Who, or what, is Irish, or a Basque, in the context of this cave? My people, if I can call them that, have been around for 2,500 years, give or take. His may be much older – the origins of the singular Basque language and culture remain an ethno-anthropological mystery. But according to radiocarbon dating of the ashes they dropped like breadcrumbs on their path through Atxurra, the ones who came to make art here were mid-to-late period Magdalenians, between 12,000 and 14,500 years ago.

That’s not so long compared to Altamira, but long enough for almost all their paint to peel off. When we reached the first artworks at the rear of the cave I could feel the wind and hear the dripping water that had stripped away the pigments or covered them in sediment. For a long while I could not make out what Garate was pointing to, until my eyes and brain refocused to see the animals assuming form under his finger. Practiced at this, he traced their shapes from point to point like constellations. “So here we have a forest bison,” he said.

“This is the head, the chin, the horns over here. The back leg, and the tail.” There was still a hint of soot on that one, the only figure here that had kept a little of its charcoal colouring. The others had been exfoliated down to their original engraving lines, which Garate tried to animate with little conjuring gestures and sound effects, making a “chk-chk-chk” noise to demonstrate the discrete cuts that coalesced into a horse’s mane. Below, he showed where he had found a flint blade that was probably used to carve the ibex faintly visible above. In one spot the artists had exploited three pre-existing scratches from a cave bear claw, turning the furrows into what might have been a reindeer antler.

Another bison looked directly at us, its face composed along fortuitous dents and bulges in the rock. “They love to do that,” said Garate, in a conspicuous present tense. “They find these concavities and play with the shapes.” We moved on to a location that he’d named the Ledge of the Horses, where three of those animals were etched in fairly clear white lines, above three corresponding fireplaces, on a raised platform that curled overhead like a breaking wave of limestone. To an audience standing in the gallery below, he said, the flames would make the horses seem to run. “So it’s like a theatre, like a performance.”

“We know it was important, because they invested so much time, and effort, and risk, and resources, to bring people here, and to tell them something. But what they were saying, the significance of the message … Why three horses on this wall? Why two lions in some other place? We don’t know, and we will never know.” In this he respectfully disagreed with Ran Barkai, David Lewis-Williams, and every other scholar who proposed to decipher why the art was made. To Garate, the operative question could be framed in material and quantifiable terms. Through close study of their planning and execution, he asked instead how much it meant to those who did the job.

We took our boots off and put on little rubber slippers to climb up onto the ledge without abrading the surface. Once up there, we sat down cross-legged beside the scorched pits where the artists set their fires. Garate and Intxaurbe had been first to see their work in at least five hundred generations, by virtue of a certain discipline and rigour. “If you weren’t already familiar with how Paleolithic people represent a bison, for example, then you’d never find them.”

I asked if they had cried at the sight of it, like the spelunkers who discovered Chauvet in 1994 – that other top-ranked French contender for the Champions League of rock art, now probably the best-preserved and protected of all decorated caves. “Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah,” said Garate. “We were really touched.” He sounded sincere enough, but didn’t seem the type to ever really lose his scientific composure. My own default was uncool, and unscientific.

Talk of tears brought to mind the cosmic-Teutonic tone of Werner Herzog’s voiceover for Cave of Forgotten Dreams, his documentary about Chauvet. “Do they cry at night?” asked Herzog of the anonymous prodigies who created what may be humanity’s first masterpiece. (He too used a peculiar present tense throughout.)

Wrangling his specially adapted 3D cameras through that primordial Sistine Chapel, hidden for the entire duration of human civilisation behind a cliff above the River Ardèche, Herzog intercut the resulting footage with shots of albino crocodiles in the warming waters around a nearby nuclear power plant. Then he mused in his stentorian, Bavarian manner: “Are we today the crocodiles who look back into an abyss of time when we see the paintings of Chauvet cave?”

Well, are we? If anyone was qualified to answer it might be Garate, having actually seen those paintings. A mere handful of specialists are briefly permitted inside for a few weeks each spring, and he’d been selected for that study group every March for the last eight years. Oh to behold for oneself the “The Venus” and “The Sorcerer”, as they are now known – a phantasmic public triangle and an enigmatic horned man-bison hybrid, drawn in charcoal down a vertical cone of limestone.

I wanted my share of vicarious astonishment from Garate – a spaceman making regular trips to a forbidden planet – and he gave me a taste. “In other caves, like this one, you can sense how much time has passed. But when you enter Chauvet, you would think it was all done last night. Like the artists only just left, because you came in and disturbed them.”

I felt that distance in Atxurra, the fathomless timescale that separated me from whoever first sat in this spot with a lithic chisel and a stone pot of pigment. A much younger site than Chauvet, this cave was so weathered as to look much older. And the art itself was very different here, Garate told me, those earlier painters being “crazier, and more expressionist”, as he put it.

He didn’t really think of the later Magdalenians as “artists” per our contemporary definitions, but something more like skilled artisans, working off a template that he’d seen repeated in other caves from roughly the same period. He identified their style so readily because it was rather uniform in its naturalism, almost as if bound by regulation. Garate compared it to Soviet propaganda posters and to the rigid forms of Egyptian hieroglyphics.

In the spotlight cast by my helmet lamp, he pulled the stiff-armed, right-angled pose of a Pharaoh as drawn on a mummy’s tomb. “It’s like, ‘this is the way you have to do it’,” he said. And this formed the basis of a guiding theory, developed in the course of his career: that the images he’d spent so long staring at were “governed by codes and systems of representation”. In his humility, or intellectual caution, this was the first I’d heard him supposing.

“Let’s say that the people who decorated these walls were conditioned by pre-established premises that they had to respect. This activity required complex logistical preparation in terms of resources. Certain people had to specialize in these tasks, leaving aside the more basic survival tasks, such as hunting and fishing. Now, this implies the creation of surpluses in some kind of hierarchy. So, what we call ‘art’ here, beyond the mystery of its meaning, might help us understand the organisation of that past society. And, possibly, the very origins of inequalities in humanity.”

Whatever picture of paleolithic culture that Garate had been composing in his own work, it did not seem much like an anarchistic picnic. And if things have gone wrong for our species, he was inclined to think it started earlier than others would have it – long before we put down roots and went to seed. He preferred to look at what was right in front of him, he said. But whenever he “imagined” prehistory, he thought of a very big book, “of which we only have a few scattered pages”, and archaeology as a very close reading of what little text is there.

Even that, he conceded, “can give you a kind of vision, or a longer view of humanity.” “You often find yourself thinking about who makes the decisions now, and sometimes you wish that they could see what you see.” In Cave of Forgotten Dreams, Werner Herzog framed the difference between them, the painters, and us, their present inheritors: “We are locked in history; they were not.” When I asked for his view of our future, Garate offered his own variation.

If we ever achieved harmony with our surroundings, he said, there is much more evidence for it in prehistory than in the modern world. Anthropocentrism has disrupted that relationship, to make us ignorant of our environment and dependent on objects of “dubious real need”. Thus encumbered, we have lost the resilience and fleet-footedness of those who once moved cave to cave across his field of interest. To put it simply, he said: “They were adaptable, and I don’t think we are any more.”

****

Frank Gehry’s design for the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao is said to resemble an abstract silver sculpture of a fish, or a ship – fins twisting in the water, or sails flapping in the wind. Built on the site of a former timber yard, it seems to float just over the left bank of the Nervión River. First opened in 1997 with the hope of reviving a dying port, it has been so successful as to show how a single cultural attraction can help save an entire city.

At present, the museum stands about 19 metres, or 52 feet, above sea level. Even in the highest-emission scenario, floodwaters probably won’t overwhelm the structure within the next 100 years or so. But the ice sheets will continue to melt for centuries after that – the rate and extent depending on how long we keep releasing greenhouse gases, and how the ice responds in Greenland and Antarctica.

So let’s say that the Guggenheim will be underwater sooner or later. Its outer plates are made of titanium, specifically chosen for its toughness and resistance to corrosion. But the massive quantities of glass around the main atrium will give way under pressure, and the sea will fill the galleries above its porous limestone base. So let’s also say that this is all the more reason to enjoy it now. Or, this is what I told myself when touring that museum for the very first time, within hours of returning to the surface world from the Atxurra cave.

I thought it might be fun, and instructive, to go and look at a load of contemporary art straight after seeing some of the oldest ever made. Garate drove me most of the way and dropped me at a suburban bus stop. In his youth he lived and studied in Bilbao, when it was still a decaying city of heavy industry, all smokestacks on the horizon.

“From where we’re standing now, it used to look like Mordor,” he said. It had changed beyond recognition in the interval, but he still didn’t like it, nor any other big city: “They’re just not for me.” Garate shook my hand and went to pick up his kids from school, while I rode a bus into town to find the Guggenheim reflecting full evening sunlight.

The exterior was a blinding swirl of liquid metal, the interior a crowded hall of silhouettes against the huge bright windows. Big canvases by Rothko, Warhol and Basquiat seemed comparatively small in the colossal spaces where they hung, their work folded into the perspective-play of Gehry’s design. Being so fresh out of a cave I might have been more entranced by their beautiful abstractions than at some other time, in another museum.

But I don’t think the effect was anything essential in the paintings so much as a new contextual long-view, giving me a tremendous sense of acceleration. Art itself didn’t change that much for stunning spans of human history. A given tribe could enter a cave system to find the paintings left inside 10,000 years before, then add their own with more or less the same motifs and techniques.
Now here I was looking at shapes and colours made when my father was a toddler, then a teenager, then a parent to my own young self. All of it now old, and past, and quaint, and especially when set against the exhibition in the next room. Living Architecture: Gehry is a live video project by the digital artist Refik Anadol, who trained an AI model on 35 million images, then deployed it to generate new specs for single buildings and entire skylines, unfolding from blueprint to finished edifice in nanoseconds. It made me feel obsolete, watching some new species raise a city before my eyes.

We can only guess what a Magdalenian would make of this. Amusing to imagine him or her not slack-jawed and stupified but arch and unimpressed, hairy arms folded and one thick eyebrow raised, dismissing all our so-called “modern” art with the pronouncement: “After Atxurra, all is decadence.”

As for the homo sapiens of 12,000 to 14,000 years from now, it’s so hard to believe that there will be any such people. If the Guggenheim’s permanent collection is still on the walls when the Estuary of Bilbao overflows, the saltwater will destroy them quick enough. If the lights are still on then it will short them out too, snuffing the galaxy-in-a-box effect of Yayoi Kusama’s blockbuster installation Infinity Mirrored Room: A Wish for Human Happiness Calling from Beyond the Universe.

Richard Serra’s piece The Matter of Time was absolutely built to last, though: seven looming, cave-like sculptures of rust-red weathered steel that will surely survive a long spell under the sea, and whatever conditions define the ages to follow.