A mushroom forager discovered the cave paintings by digging out a mud plug at the back of a minor cave already known to locals. This opened a keyhole to a chamber untouched since the Upper Paleolithic. My father was the first archaeologist there, and he called for me once my studies were done and only a dissertation was in the way of my doctorate. I considered refusing his offer—it already felt like I was coming up in his shadow—but the data he sent pointed to a discovery that could rewrite the human timeline.
Henri and Sylvie, both from the department chaired by my father, greeted me the night I arrived. They were drunk.
“Your dad is alone in the cave,” Sylvie said. “He’s there alone most nights. We overlap for a few hours in the morning, but—”
“He keeps his work to himself,” Henri said bitterly.
I had my own bedroom with a sloped ceiling at the top of the farmhouse the university owned. We drove out to the cave just after dawn the next morning, passing around a wand of dried sausage and a thermos of coffee as we went.
Two men in suits, unbroken boots, and off-the-rack parkas stamped their feet on the ground by the mouth. “Ignore them,” Henri told me, defiant and loud. “They were sent by the hunting club. They lease this land from the Ministry of the Environment but act like they own it. We have more of a right to be here than they do.”
But the men only said good morning, and we went unharassed into the karst. This part of the cave was all graffiti, scratched names, and extension cords, which were connected to the generator outside and led around a corner to the jumble of limestone at the end of the cavern. White Christmas lights illuminated a step stool, used for climbing headfirst into the recently uncovered passage. The ratty ends of a blue tarp dribbled out of the opening.
“You go first. We’ll surprise the hell out of your dad,” Sylvie said. “It’s easiest to put your hands in front of you like Superman, then we’ll push you by the bottom of your boots.”
They pushed me by my boots as far down the stone throat as they could reach. My arms were pinned in front of me, and my heart got louder. I felt cold air on my hands. My arms floated in a black chamber. I pulled myself over the lip at the end of the passage, tumbled out, and clung to the wall. I didn’t have a flashlight, and suddenly I felt like the stupidest person in the world. Who goes into a cave without a flashlight?
“Professor?” I said, to no response. “Dad?”
With my cell phone light I followed the wall and the upward slope of the ceiling until I could fully stand. I thought I could see to the far end of the chamber, but it was too murky to be sure, and the more I swung my light around the more the shadows confused me. Something was wrong. I could taste smoke in the air. It was greasy in my nostrils.
“Why is it so dark in here?” Sylvie said from immediately behind me. I jumped into the low ceiling.
Then she hit a switch on a surge protector, lighting LEDs around an inner perimeter. The light was still low, so while I could see the contours of ancient artwork, the cave paintings appeared only dimly. There was no revelation; I squinted to discern anything at all.
“It smells like something’s burning,” I said.
“Your dad uses a little oil lamp sometimes,” Sylvie said, then raised her voice and threw it to the back of the cave, “but he said he would stop, since the smoke might damage the paintings.” She slapped the side of a ribbed black box until it came to life with a hum. “And you have to turn on the dehumidifier when you’re in here overnight,” she said.
She passed over a work mask and told me to put it on when I examined a wall so the carbon dioxide and moisture in my breath wouldn’t corrode the paint.
The art was a jumble. There were animals: bison, rhinoceroses, and a cave bear skull. I had never seen a skull depicted in cave art before. There was a human figure—several human figures—including a woman with yellow ochre spokes radiating from the top of her neck, obscuring her face. Depictions of humans are rare in European cave art, with the exception of a few human-animal shamans and hunters—I had never seen anything like this star-faced woman before. I was in the presence of something sacred.
Sylvie lead me back, further into the cave, only pausing to indicate a fork breaking the back of the chamber. She said I didn’t ever need to go to the right. Then she directed me to squeeze around the wedge of limestone sprawled across the inside of the left passage.
“I’m not supposed to go any further,” Sylvie said, and reluctantly elaborated when I expressed confusion. “Your dad wants to study one of the paintings privately. Henri and me, we’re only adjuncts, so…”
“He’s keeping a big discovery to himself?”
“We don’t know,” she said, with “but we’d like to” on her face.
“He only sent me radiometric data of a charcoal sample dated to 44,000 BCE,” I said, trying to let her know that I wasn’t hiding anything from her.
Sylvie directed me to squeeze against the wall, and I used my hands to scoot myself around the stone.
“That’s older than anything out here,” she said to me before I was out of sight.
A wall of light was on the other side. It came through semi-opaque plastic sheeting, which formed a double doorway across the passage. I lifted a flap.
There were work lights in wire cages, hung pointed left, right, left, right, their cords dangling like rat tails. Then there was the end of the passage, and in front of it a man’s back, erect and stacked upright in a kneel, his face turned to the wall. His knees popped, echoing as he stood, and his shadow fell over a sequence of paintings that I would spend the next year studying.
I could see at his feet the lamp Sylvie mentioned. Its flame was out, but the oil pooled around its wick still let off a curl of smoke, like incense.
“That’s nonsense about the lamp,” he said to me. “It’s exactly what the painters would have used.”
“Design looks Gravettian to me,” I said. “So they wouldn’t have used it for another 15,000 years.”
He looked at me with undisguised pride—it was a look I had never seen cross his face before. We had not been in contact much while I was in grad school, but maybe colleague was a relationship we could navigate.
“You’ve got to look at this,” he said. He ducked to one side and I leaned toward the wall. There, unmistakable, was the star-faced woman, the same one painted out in the main chamber.
“No, look down here,” he said. He pulled one of the work lights over on its bungee cord. He brought my attention to the bottom of the wall, beneath the paintings, to a collection of symbols arrayed in wavy lines.
“It looks like proto-writing,” I said, “but that’s impossible.”
My father didn’t say anything.
“Unless they were added later? The uranium series you sent me—”
“Just like the charcoal—and everything else on this wall—we dated these symbols to 44,000 years before Christ,” he said, quietly.
Even the most simplistic ideograms, let alone proto-writing, wouldn’t appear for tens of thousands more years. But these symbols were from the very beginning of H. sapiens migration into Europe. (Neanderthals had already been painting cave walls for 20,000 years by then.)
My dad leaned in and got even quieter. “I know what it says.”
“Tell me.”
“No, you tell me,” he said. “That’s why you’re here. You’re the only person who can confirm my translation.”
I was more confused than flattered. I wasn’t a paleolinguist. And my father wasn’t the type to do me any favors.
He saw it on my face and came in close.
“If it is the oldest human idea, I need to be certain that I understand it,” he said, then, with slow emphasis, “I need to know you see what I see here.”
I studied that patch of cave wall (three meters long and half as high) for the next year. But I didn’t need research to translate the symbols, because I could read them almost as soon as I saw them. I just didn’t believe it, and it took me a year before I did.
Over that year I wrote my dissertation, putting forth startling conclusions about the cave painting. My father never advised me, and was out of the cave whenever we were in it, spending his time writing preprints for minor research claims in non-English journals. Meanwhile, Henri and Sylvie pored over my research into the sequence of paintings, never suspecting that I hid from them the written symbols underneath, at my father’s request.
And maybe my father was right to be reluctant about trumpeting this find. While the Panel de las Manos and Chauvet-Pont-d’Arc are objects of national pride, it was hard to imagine anyone from our tourism bureau promoting this.
The paintings didn’t say anything flattering about us.
They primarily feature two figures, who I’ve named Youngman and Starface. We know the figure that appears throughout the sequence is Youngman because he bears the same phallus and the same staff in each image. The beginning of the sequence depicts Youngman with his back to his parents and to his village.
His travels are depicted as sequential art, in a style and format that was millennia more developed than its radiocarbon dating suggested. It was closer to Egyptian art in its formal characteristics, and far exceeded the sophistication of the paintings in the main chamber, which were more in line with Aurignacian art of the subsequent 10,000 years.
Youngman’s adventure leads him to Starface, a shaman woman. She looked as she did out in the main cave, with golden fronds fanning out from an empty face.
Together Youngman and Starface create art. Starface shows Youngman how to mix paints. They paint spirals on bison and diamonds on elk. She teaches him the stars. They arrange flowers and skulls in patterns. Summer passes into winter—the trees are now bare—and so they paint the tree trunks. They were not cave painters. They were everywhere painters.
Then the stars appear in the same positions again. A year of creating art has passed.
Youngman returns to his village, where he’s set upon and killed by Starface, his mother, and his father. They hold his disembodied head between them, with Starface holding Youngman’s face in front of her heart. In the final tableau, mother and father have star faces too.
Most ominously, an army approaches. Or, that’s my best guess. It’s a clump of human shapes. They’re depicted bulkily, with thick shoulders and long, sharp fingers. It may be leather armor. They all have star faces.
It was a depiction of child sacrifice unlike any other, with the parents as co-conspirators and their child fledged for the purpose—brought through a ritual of initiation and adulthood, only to be snuffed out by his teacher.
A year passed, and I was ready to translate the cave’s words for my father. I wanted to feel absolutely certain that I wasn’t somehow imagining my own meaning and applying it to the prehistoric symbols. Because it didn’t make sense. All I did was look at the words long enough and their meaning came to me. There are dozens of undeciphered writing systems around the world with more available evidence than these handful of symbols. But I knew these words. Even across tens of thousands of years, I knew these words. It was as if they were in my brain somewhere already.
This morning I told my dad. “Offer your children and we will create you,” I said to him.
He looked at me like the sky was shattering. His eyes filled with tears and he turned away to retrieve an envelope from his room. He was shaking as he pressed it into my hands. The envelope was grimy and pocket-crumpled, with a stamp postmarked to some time before my arrival. Inside was a sheet of paper.
“Offer your children and we will create you,” it said.
My dad looked at me very seriously. “You know I saw her?” he said.
“Saw who, Professor?” I asked. We were in the bathroom hallway, a few feet from the kitchen where Henri was preparing a big pot of oatmeal. My dad lowered his voice. He looked very old to me, in his wool socks and jean shorts. Distracted too, like he was dead tired and his pillow was in sight behind me.
“Starface,” he said. “I was taking spectroscopy measurements and dating samples one night. The lights were off and I only had my lamplight. Then she was standing there, just like you are. And she spoke to me. It wasn’t in any language I recognized, but I understood it anyway. She said—well, but that doesn’t matter right now. What’s important is that, thanks to you, I know I’m not crazy.”
He gifted me his oil lamp, and told me how he chipped its round, shallow reservoir from a hunk of basalt when he was around my age. It seemed to make him sad talking about it, so he changed the subject.
“There’s a lot to do,” he said, then left me to find Henri and Sylvie for an errand into the city.
But first they drove me to the cave in Sylvie’s beat up Skoda before leaving me alone. There was a new tension between us. Henri broke the silence.
“We’re not just your dad’s research assistants,” he said. “Did you know he’s sending us all the way back to the university?”
“I know, I’m sorry,” I said. The entire main chamber and its myriad paintings was enough to make the careers of a hundred archaeologists, but I had gotten used to Henri complaining about the sealed off passage and the room at its end.
“We know there’s a major discovery you’re not sharing,” Sylvie blurted out. “And we can’t do our best work without a full apprehension of the scope of the cave’s industry.”
“I finally confirmed my dad’s findings,” I said. “I’m sure we can share everything soon.”
That didn’t really satisfy them, but they put on the appearance of friendliness long enough to drop me off. At the last minute, I leaned back into the passenger-side window.
“You’re going back to the university, right? Would you drop off the final draft of my dissertation with my faculty adviser?”
I handed over my sheathed dissertation, which included my analysis of the symbols—now they could decide whether or not to see it all for themselves.
They bumped up the road and were gone. There was no one on the site but me. The university cut our funding weeks ago. The hunting club bought out our security company and taped up legal notices. We just kept tearing them down.
I was accustomed to sliding myself down the cave’s throat, into the main chamber, with its jumbled tableaus. I turned on the dehumidifier and looked around the main chamber. The star-faced woman appears thirty-four times here. She is found all over the walls in tangles of animals, and always accompanied by a different young man or young woman. It’s not neatly sequential, like the paintings down the left-side passage, but many of the elements found in the back of the cave there can be found out here too.
She, or her people, did it over and over again. The shaman brings the young across the threshold of adulthood, and then she snatches them back to dust. She always take their heads. Everyone always becomes a starface. The story isn’t as easy to read out here, but it is being told in all directions, over and over. It swirls around me.
I sat down among the paintings, got on my phone, and spent a few hours composing this account. I don’t know why it feels so urgent to get it written, but nothing feels right about our work here anymore. It’s the most important archaeological find maybe in our country’s history, but no one wants anything to do with it. Everyone just wants us to go away.
I have my dad’s stone oil lamp with me. It is fueled by waxy lumps of deer tallow. I’m going to light it.
The light from the lamp is warm. The cavern was painted in light like this.
I think I hear my dad coming.
UPDATE:
Just tell it calmly and breathe.
My dad didn’t come over to me when he entered the cave instead he turned around kneeled and used the barbecue lighter we had by the stove to light something that looked like a big PVC pipe and then he stuffed that back into the keyhole passage back to the cave mouth antechamber.
Then he attacked me he had a rock he brought in from outside he hit me with it but it glanced off and I was so full of adrenaline so suddenly that I can’t even feel it now even with the blood dripping from my head.
Then the bomb went off and I fall back and the pressure wave in my ear is still buzzing and smoke filled the cavern so I was coughing it was hard to breathe. The keyhole was closed there’s no way out of the cave and my dad got up and kept circling and backing off and then he had a hammer.
I ran to the only place I could think of I ran to the passages at the back of the cavern but this time I went down the right to the passage with no paintings, it is only a squeeze shaft we call the long worm and no one has been down it. One local caver tried but we pulled her up after a few meters we thought professionals might navigate and map it but now it is too late for that because I went down head first. I never even go over there I was so afraid of it now I’m down it and well I’m not stuck yet but I don’t want to go any deeper.
He heard me and tried to come after me, and clawed at my legs like a subterranean animal and he kept saying I thought you understood I thought you understood.
Now he’s stuck somewhere above me I’m much smaller than him. He’s face down and I can hear him still and he was talking to me for a while he was saying how the words were enochian and angelical and the language adam used to name the animals and anything so perfect it could be understood by us 44,000 years later must be more than us and know more than us because our whole lives are built in this broken world and we have no choice but to believe the words are more true than anything we had ever known. So he could not reject them. He had to offer me.
But now he is just crying and struggling to breathe. He is trapped above me and my only choice is to go down until I’m stuck too and we both die in here with red faces from being upside down or until I find a way out though anybody who has read anything about caving know hows unlikely that is so I’m using voice recognition to try and add this quick update and maybe someone will find this.
I did not bring a flashlight again all I have is this phone and a few things in my pocket I guess these are my last words I’m going to go down now I am scared I am trying not to panic but my dad is crying behind and above me and I cannot stand to listen to it anymore.