Magdalenian Mythology

The magnificence of the ceiling at Altamira leaves you wanting to know more. It can’t have been meaningless. Artists took so much time honing their techniques and experimenting with pigments to create their effects. That was time granted them by others, a leave from hunting or knapping or preparing food.

Some who had read James Frazer’s The Golden Bough looked at the animals - the steppe bison, red deer and horses - and suggested the paintings were a form of magic executed to ensure a successful hunt.

That argument made more sense for the portable art, the points and artifacts that were carried from place to place. Earlier, the Solutreans had created beautiful, finely crafted laurel leafs to use against their prey. Magdalenian knappers produced more utilitarian stone work, but they incised their antler and bone tips with symbols.

When they depicted a species it was one that actually was hunted like a female red deer or hind. More than four times as many of the bones found at Altamira were from red deer as other species: 19 as opposed to four from horses and four from bison.

Others, familiar with the mythology of groups like the San Juan and Jicarilla Apache mentioned in the post for 23 April 2015, saw the special relationship with stone as evidence of attempts to contact spirits who dwelt below ground. Jean Clottes believed the process of creation was more important than the finished image.

That hypothesis better explained the hand stencils, the circles painted around holes in cave walls, and the simpler designs found in remote passages in caves.

Some went farther to suggest places like Altamira became communal centers were bands came together to share seasonal rituals, exchange goods, and find mates.

André Leroi-Gourhan looked at the composition of paintings in France and Spain, which he thought reflected social values with female animals in the center and males on the edges. Others have seen the 17 bison at Altamira as a herd of males and females joined for the rutting season. Two horses and two hinds were on the periphery.

Leslie Freeman tried to calculate the number of pounds of meat each species yielded. He believed a steppe bison might have produced 881 pounds, a horse 396, and a red deer 220.

It’s harder to convert those pounds into units of nutrition. The USDA provides information on modern animals, and not always on comparable classes. An ounce of ground raw bison provides 63 calories of energy and an ounce of ground raw deer 45. An ounce of raw deer meat, however, provides 34 calories and an ounce of raw horse 38.

For the equally important measure of protein per ounce, the USDA calculated ground raw bison provided 5.29 grams of protein compared to 6.16 from ground raw deer meat. Raw deer meat provided 6.51 grams and raw horse 6.06.

In cold years, the amount of fat was critical. USDA report probably underestimate the glacial period because animals are bred for leanness today. Still, bison would have been better. An ounce of raw ground meat contains 5.13 grams; the same cut of deer has 2.02. Raw deer has .69 grams per ounce and horse has 1.3.

Red deer may have provided fewer calories than the ones used by the USDA. Still, it seems, a pound of red deer was more nutritious than a pound of horse or steppe bison, but there were fewer pounds available per animal and it didn’t provide the same insulation against the cold. It took more hunting effort to provide the same amount of usable food. It may be one reason anthropologists believed Magdalenians developed mass hunting techniques for red deer.

What nutrition data really means was individuals who didn’t live through famine times had a better chance of reaching maturity and having excess energy to invest in activities that weren’t essential to physical survival.

One can dismiss the various explanations for the fluorescence in Magalenian art, but you’re still left with the basic evidence of symbolic language as well as verbal, of visual and intellectual imagination, of some form of a cosmology.

When I look at the herd of bison I think of a paradise lost, a mythic time remembered when animals were more plentiful and people didn’t eat so many mollusks. That implies not just an apprentice system for training knappers and artists, but story telling and history, a sense of past and present.

We associate such cognitive skills with modern Homo sapiens. They may well have existed among the Aurignicians and the Solutreans, but something in the experience of the Magdalenians 14,000 years ago stimulated them to express themselves in ways that left a record for us.

It may have been the sheer increase in population in a limited area with animals confined by climate that allowed such specialization among a small group.

When the climate warmed many plant and animal species migrated north. Their hunters followed. Art returned to daylight sites. The Magdalenian cultured ended 12,000 years ago.

Notes:
Bahn, Paul G. and Jean Vertut. Journey Through the Ice Age, 1997.

Clottes, Jen and David Lewis Williams. The Shamans of Prehistory, translated by Sophie Hawkes, 1998.

Conkey, Margaret W. "The Identification of Prehistoric Hunter-Gatherer Aggregation Sites: The Case of Altamira [and Comments and Reply]," Current Anthropology 21:609-630:1980.

Frazer, James George. The Golden Bough, first published in 1890, and expanded in later editions.

Freeman, L. G. "The Significance of Mammalian Faunas from Paleolithic Occupations in Cantabrian Spain," American Antiquity 38:3-44:1973.

Leroi-Gourhan, André. The Dawn of European Art, translated by Sara Champion, 1982; both Bahn and Clottes summarize his ideas.

United States Department of Agriculture. Agricultural Research Service. National Nutrient Database.

Graphics:
Utilisateur:120, "Great Hall of Policromes of Altamira," published by Marcelino Sanz de Sautuola in 1880, uploaded to Wikimedia Commons 14 March 2006.