Steak - Mark Schatzker [29]
Dennis Tauxe, who has spent a considerable portion of his waking life in the fake Lascaux and even a little time inside the real one, thinks the paintings were inspired by their artists’ religion. “The walls are not the story of their life,” he told me. They are, he believes, a reflection of a long-lost people’s dreams and myths. “The cave was a metaphysical place,” he said, and it struck me as very French to associate the word metaphysical with prehistoric paintings. “It was almost like the first church,” he added, popping another mushroom in his mouth. “Lascaux,” he grandly announced, “is the memory of the culture of Lascaux.”
The flank steaks arrived. They were a bit tough and a little thin in the flavor department. As I chewed, I wrestled with doubt. Were the paintings about hunting? Tribal warfare? The cycle of creation? Did the Stone Age hunters of Lascaux worship animal spirits?
Maybe. But maybe not. No one can say for sure.
But the paintings must have meant something. One unusual panel features a bison with its intestines spilling out of its gut charging a man with the head of a bird sporting an erection. If the man or woman who painted that painting didn’t think it meant something, then all art is meaningless. The problem is certainty. Lascaux meant something to the people who painted it. But what?
I looked at the steak on my plate. The ancients probably contended with a fair amount of tough meat. Steak, it seemed to me, might have something to do with the images on those walls. The Siriono, !Kung, Sharanahua, and Aché, after all, are all hunter-gatherers, and they are all obsessed with meat. Could Stone Age hunter-gatherers have been any different?
Consider that predators make up a scant 3 percent of painted animals in European cave art. Seven lions and one bear inhabit Lascaux, as compared to around six hundred non-flesh-eating animals. Lascaux is about prey. Lascaux is about tasty-looking prey. There is not a scrawny or diseased aurochs on Lascaux’s walls, even though scrawny, diseased aurochs were certainly roaming the forests of primeval Europe. Looking at the walls is not all that different from flipping through the pages of a hunting magazine: both are rife with picture-perfect specimens. The aurochs are all fat, vigorous, and in the prime of life. If there is a suggestion of fertility, perhaps it has less to do with the ancient obsession with the cosmic cycle of creation and more to do with the fact that big, four-legged mammals like deer and aurochs mate in the autumn, after months spent grazing on prime forage. The fat males are prepared to expend expendable calories battling it out to prove who is the mightiest. The females carry heavy reserves of fat to support fetuses, which gestate over the winter and hit the ground in spring, with a summer’s worth of good foraging ahead of them. To a meat-hungry, fat-craving Stone Age hunter-gatherer, an autumnal aurochs is the best kind of aurochs there is.
So add the following theory to the pile: Lascaux is indeed a holy place, but it comes from an era when the line between church and steak house was not so easily drawn.
I asked Denis if any bones had ever been found at the caves. He said yes—reindeer bones. Reindeer are widely thought to have been the most common meat consumed by Europe’s Stone Agers, because a lot of their bones have turned up at archaeological digs. More recent research suggests that the equation may not be quite that simple. The French biologist Dorothée Drucker, who teaches at the University of Tübingen in Germany, and who enjoys her