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Experts Rave Over French Prehistoric Cave Art Find

PARIS Stunning prehistoric engravings uncovered in a cave in western France could be just a foretaste of the treasures held in the dank interior, but the public will probably never get a glimpse, an archaeologist said on Thursday. Art experts have hailed the find at Cussac in the Dordogne valley as a major discovery, with the grotto chamber covered in spectacular drawings of wild animals, hybrid beasts, birds and women and erotic imagery. "This site is of world importance," said Dany Barraud, the Culture Ministry's head of archaeology in the Dordogne region. Initial estimates have suggested the vivid engravings are between 22,000 and 28,000 years old -- much earlier than famous wall paintings in the nearby Lascaux cave complex that are reputed to be more than 16,000 years old. "We are talking about monumental engravings. We have found more than 100 engravings so far, but we think that there are many more. The trouble is that it is an extremely fragile site which is hindering our work," Barraud told Reuters.
The cave floor consists of unstable clay, while the limestone walls are flaky and susceptible to temperature changes, preventing large groups from visiting the chamber. In addition, there is a high level of carbon gas in the underground passages, which means that archaeologists can only spend a maximum of three hours on site before having to return to the surface for fresh air.

replica planned for tourists
"It will not be opened to the public, but the local authorities are considering creating a replica of the site in a nearby cave for tourists," said Barraud. The Cussac cave was uncovered by speleologist Marc Delluc last September, but the importance of the finding was only made public this week. The engravings are dotted along a chamber 900 meters (yards) long, some 15 meters wide and more than 10 meters high. Among the artwork is a picture of a bison some four meters long -- one of the biggest single prehistoric engravings ever found, and one scene featuring up to 40 figures. Among the line carvings are animals with deformed heads, a bison with a horse's head, silhouttes of women and half a dozen representations of female erotica.
"There is undoubtedly a very special atmosphere at Cussac... There is an originality here," said Jean Clottes, an adviser on Prehistoric Rock Art at the Culture Ministry. Archaeologists have also found human remains in the cave, although they are not yet sure if the relatively well-preserved skeletons date from a later age than the artwork. The Cussac discovery is the second major prehistoric art site found in France in less than a decade. In 1994, potholers stumbled across a complex of galleries full of paintings in the Ardeche gorge. Experts believe the animal pictures there are some 32,000 years old and, as with Cussac, the public has been barred access to safeguard the site.

Study of Art Gives Insight Into Brain's Structure

Reuters

WASHINGTON Understanding what makes a work of art beautiful might be an important clue into the workings of the human brain, a scientist reported on Thursday. In an article in the latest issue of the journal Science, Semir Zeki proposed a new field of science, neuroesthetics, which would study the relationship between art and the brain. "Visual art obeys the laws of the visual brain, and thus reveals these laws to us," he wrote. Artists have a way of tapping into the parts of the brain that are stimulated by art, said Zeki, a professor of neurobiology at University College London. "In a sense they're also studying the brain, but with a different technique, the technique of painting," he said in a telephone interview.
Scientists are just beginning to use art to uncover how the brain pieces together images into a coherent picture. The work of processing of images occurs in the visual cortex, which makes up one-quarter of the brain. To examine the cortex, Zeki used functional magnetic resonance imaging and transcranial electronic stimulation, which temporarily shuts down portions of the brain so that other portions may be studied. By monitoring individual cells in the brain while showing patients samples of art, scientists have pinpointed regions that respond to motion, color and shapes.

future Picassos & Michelangelos
But artists discovered these areas unknowingly many years earlier, Zeki said. He gave the example of kinetic artists, like Alexander Calder, whose works of the mid-1900s focused on motion while minimizing the use of color and shapes. "Their work should have predicted that there was an area of the brain that does that, only scientists found it many years later," he said. This area became known as the V5 complex. Zeki's research now concentrates on how and when the various regions of the visual brain are triggered. Scientists once thought that parts of the visual brain react simultaneously, but Zeki's current research is showing that some areas respond faster to stimuli than others. V4, which responds to color, reacts faster than V5, the motion center, Zeki said.
Someday scientists will be able to see whether artists' brains are different than everybody else's, Zeki said. And further study might be able to predict children with the talent to be the next Picasso or Michelangelo. "A lot of it depends on level of technology and level of resolution. I think if we're able to get to a high enough level of spatial and temporal resolution, we'll be able to detect differences, and no doubt there are," he said. Zeki lectures regularly at the Slade School of Art in London and said artists are curious about the correlation between art and the brain. "I think they're interested in the apparatus that produces their work, which is the brain," he said. "I'm not sure they change their style, they certainly change their views."

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