Whispers from the stone age

It can send a tingle up the spine to hear the voices of our ancestors speaking to us across a gap of 7000 years. 

It’s one-way communication, of course. Try to talk back and it’s not so much a tingle you need, as counselling.

The voices aren’t spoken, either. You hear them with your eyes, not your ears. And it’s a whisper not a shout, in faded paintings on rock walls. But still touching, still poignant and, above all, still eloquent.

Where we went was in the ‘crooked valley’, Valltorta, in the north of the Valencian region where we live. We visited two places with Neolithic wall paintings, not so much in caves as in what are called ‘rocks shelters’. These are relatively shallow indentations in a cliff face, but with overhanging rock providing something of a roof.

Think of it as a stone-age bus shelter, and you won’t be far off. Though ancestors hopeful of a bus showing up would have been in for a long wait.

What I found most striking was how similar those ancestors were to us. Or should that be the other way around? How little we’ve changed since then.

That was moving but also chastening.

First of all, among all the dozens of figures there was only one that was possibly a woman. I did wonder why it was that we assume that the ones in trousers were all men, but the astonishingly well-informed and infectiously enthusiastic guide, provided the answer before I could even ask: it’s all to do with how you have a pee. 

You can work out the rest for yourself.

And what were all these men doing?

The Cave of the Horses as my camera captured it (left)
and in a reproduction in the Valltorta musem (right)
See the faintness of the drawings?
But it's moving to pick them out at all

The first place we visited has a name which is a wonderful monument to our capacity to jump to entirely mistaken assumptions: its modern discoverers called it the ‘cave of the horses’. Not a single horse appears in the paintings. The animals they took for horses are deer. 

To be honest, the antlers are a bit of a giveaway. 

What’s happening in the dynamic and fast-moving scene? A group of men armed with bows is chasing the deer from behind towards another group waiting to ambush them. Several of the deer already have arrows in their bodies; one indeed has three, has dropped behind the others, and is clearly not long for this world.

It’s a remarkable painting to be able to narrate a whole story so dramatically and yet so economically – the artist used a limited palette of paints and showed figures only, no background. But it’s also wonderful for what it reveals of social attitudes. 

The guide explained that we have a good idea of the diet of the people of the time and, while meat certainly figured in it, large animals like deer only contributed about 2-3% of the total. We’ve found the bones of animals eaten for meat. Predominantly, they’re from rabbits or birds, probably trapped rather than hunted.

So what the artist has chosen to depict is something unusual. A major, special event, and it’s likely only an elite took part. In other words, Neolithic society had a celebrity culture just like ours: it didn’t focus on the humdrum activities of daily living. The whole ‘gatherer’ side of hunter-gatherer life, mostly carried out by women, or the trapping of small animals (I wonder whether that wasn’t at least in part women’s work too?), was probably just too dull to figure in a self-respecting cave painter’s art. He (I suspect it was a he) celebrated a self-perpetuating entitled elite, just as our gossip magazines do today.

The other rock shelter was the ‘Civil Guard’ cave which, at least, has the merit of being accurately named, in that its discoverer was a Spanish policeman, a Guardia Civil. What does it show? Again, lots of men. Lots of bows. Lots of arrows, including a quiver or two. 

Part of the scene from the Civil Guard cave

At first, there was some debate about whether it depicted some kind of ritual. That’s because while there were a lot of men progressing right to left (plenty of movement, again), there were few going the other way. But then sensitive instruments were brought in and the faint traces were found of a lot more figures going left to right.

So it seems we’re witnessing a battle scene. Which makes sense. Down to today, men are respected over women, and warriors over other men. The mere possession of the means to inflict lethal force is seen as precious, whether or not it's ever used or even needed. Just take a look at the US gun lobby. 

Writing hadn’t been invented yet, but if it had been, you could imagine the figures in the paintings wearing caps proclaiming, ‘Make the Neolithic Great Again’. Or, perhaps, ‘No Neanderthals here’.

Talking about caps, their headgear was a thing too, as it happens. Several of the figures we saw were wearing feathers in their hair. Not in a hat or a headband. There’s only one kind of hair that will hold a feather, and it’s the tightly curled hair we associate with black people today. Curiously, DNA analysis shows that Europeans of the time were indeed dark. Probably with blue eyes, a striking combination.

A fine-looking fellow
Cheddar Man, an early Briton
Reconstruction from a skull found in England’s Cheddar Gorge,
with the support of DNA analysis. Photo by Paul Rincon for the BBC

Perhaps anyone who could write back then might have carried the message ‘Black Lives Matter’. Or possibly not, since all lives around there were black anyway. A useful thought for white supremacists. The uninvited immigrants, the interlopers who violently invaded these lands were the whites. They seized ancestral lands from the black forefathers of any of us who claim European heritage today.

The ancestors’ voices may be faint. They may speak to us in little more than a whisper. But, boy, the message is loud and clear, isn’t it?