Cave of Bones saga followers navigating between widely dissenting beliefs on the who, when and what of the Rising Star Cave in South Africa may find solace in this latest blog post. Here we continue our journey beyond Homo naledi towards rediscovering the animal characters and stylistic relationships between the engravings in the Rising Star Cave with the Iberian Gorham’s Etching and Gallery of Discs which were introduced in the previous blog post Rising Star Cave Engravings – Part I: The Underworld – Before Orion.
By Bernie Taylor | Bernie’s Blog
Social: Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, Academia and ResearchGate
Published – December 2023
The art in these two Iberian caves dates to around 35,000 years ago, firmly falling into the culture we now refer to as Aurignacian peoples. Those were us – Homo sapiens – who came out of Africa, had already journeyed into Asia, and are culturally categorized by the artifacts we left behind. Homo naledi is important to the understanding of their fossils in the Rising Star Cave and the work of paleoanthropologists Dr. Lee Berger, Dr. Augustin Fuentes and Dr. John Hawks should be commended in this respect but the small-brained hominid from long-ago is no longer a credible player in the narrative of the Cave of Bones engravings.
On our journey to rediscover the Rising Star Cave engravings in the Dinaledi Chamber, we need to better understand the first sources of art – our primary sources – and how such may have inspired the Cave of Bones artists and their contemporaries. These first primary sources are not an artist’s drawing lions stalking in the high grass, the intertwined long necks of giraffes or cubs riding on the back of a mother bear. The first primary sources of art are where and when we initially observed the art. Through an examination of these Ice Age images as well as more recent artists’ works, and both of their first primary sources, we may learn more about where we come from in a psychological sense. This researcher has a word of warning. Beware of the dark cave you are about to enter. You will never perceive your world in the same way again.
Primary Sources of Art
The enigmatic Salvador Dalí (1904-1989) descriptively considered the first primary sources of art in his works. Dalí’s Don Quixote (1935) above is almost undisguisable from the pictured silhouette of Culleró rock, Cape de Creus National Park on Spain’s northeastern coast, as left to us by Dalí’s friend Robert Descharnes with Gilles Néret in their 2006 book Salvador Dalí, The Paintings : 1904-1989. The shape of the natural rock recalls a knight mounted on a horse. Both the archetypal hero on his journey towards self-realization and primary source of Dalí’s inspiration are timeless. Still, was the recognition of such pareidolia the first art or do the physical replication of such visions be required to meet today’s standards?
Three years later, Dalí continued to explore the primary sources of art with pareidolia layered elements in his painting The Endless Enigma (1938) above that now hangs in Madrid’s Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía. Note the mountain as a man whose head rests on his bent right arm to the viewer’s upper left. A presumably female character can be found to the viewer’s right through the overlapping of elements. A perfume bottle in the foreground becomes her chin, mouth and end of nose. The right eye appears to be a small sailing craft, indicating a coastal scene. What forms the left eye is unclear. These two characters will pop when you see them. Layers upon layers of elements and characters hint of a story that may never begin or end, truly make Dalí’s painting an endless enigma.
The woman to the viewer’s right in The Endless Enigma has some stylistic elements from Dalí’s 1934 May West, which is an actual room with furniture featuring the Hollywood film star and sex symbol. West’s eyes are within to picture frames, a table represents her nose and voluptuous lips are found in a sofa. The entrance is framed with her golden hair. One can visit his May West at the Dalí Museum in Figueres, Spain or find images online.
Dalí resaw a woman post-May West and a man in coastal mountains through his The Endless Enigma. A similar painting designates a coastal scene in his 1938 Invisible Afghan with the Apparition on the Beach of the Face of Garcia Lorca in the Form of a Fruit Dish with three Figs. The Spanish artist appears to have been on to something about both the human imagination and the primary sources of art.
One must note at this point is to study the works of Dalí, or those of any highly accomplished artist, including those in the Cave of Bones, is not to enter a crazed world, but what is instinctively recognized and projected from the human mind. Social constructs are the only limitations to what is ultimately shared on canvas or in stone. The Spanish surrealist was famously once asked what he thought of the notion that some people thought he was crazy. “Dalí is almost crazy, but the only difference between crazy people and Dalí is Dalí is not crazy,” he responded.
Most visitors to the Reina Sofía casually walk past Dalí’s The Endless Enigma. Some take a quick picture as they pass, not knowing whether or not such is permissible. From the paintings position in the hall, one is either walking to or from a longer crowded viewing of Pablo Picasso’s (1881-1973) Guernica (1937).
Picasso enters the primary sources of art narrative at the Altamira Cave in Cantabria Spain, where he had recognized pareidolia on the walls of caves where Upper Paleolithic artists found their inspirations. In the pictured images below, we can see how Altamira Cave artists from deep in the Upper Paleolithic found life-like natural irregularities on the cave walls that they enhanced with touches of black pigment and possibly some shaping of the limestone.
Some of those Altamira characters on the limestone cave wall – the first cubism – became centerpieces for some of Picasso’s most famous works of “modern art.” These include Les Demoiselles d’Avignon in 1907, which has the visual feel of a cave, and Night Fishing at Antibes in 1939, both above, that now hang at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Note how Picasso retained the black/white from the Altamira Cave that contrasts with otherwise colored Night Fishing at Antibes.
These Upper Paleolithic “mask” characters are in the same chamber of the Altamira Cave. One can visit a replica of this chamber at the Altamira Museum. A lucky few may enter the cave to see the original.
We have a record of Picasso’s thoughts in addition to his vast body of work. The ponderings of a creative mind in print. Through that record, one can look beyond the deep brown eyes that appeared to stare into the camera, holding what he then believed might have been eternally lost secrets about the human mind.
The Spanish artist was open among close friends about the first primary sources of figurative art and hinted at his inspirations “in the irregular surfaces of cavern walls.” Still, Picasso did not draw a line between cave art to any of his paintings in specific. Once asked about his inspirations, Picasso responded, “I would rather copy others than repeat myself. In that way I should at least be giving them something new” (Georges-Michel, M. 1957).
A curious banner titled “DESAPARECIDO” with a mugshot-like photo of Picasso hangs outside of the Altamira Museum. Is the cubist truly wanted by the Spanish civil authorities for his theft of Ice Age art they have yet to formally recognize. Picasso was, as he said, just trying to give us “something new.” The bottom of the banner has tear-out phone numbers if you have further information on Picasso.
More about these Altamira Cave images and the Spanish artist’s other inspirations can be found in videos and interviews at Pablo Picasso – Before Orion.
Projection
We can turn back time to the Upper Paleolithic in Northern Spain to see more examples of pareidolia as a primary source of art. An Ice Age artist between 27,000 to 16,000 years ago in the now coastal El Pindal Cave found mammoths among natural geological formations that somewhat resemble irregularities on the cave wall pictured above. The pareidolia mammoths are the first primary source of the figurative art in the mind of the Ice Age artist. The painting of a mammoth in red and carving out of at least one other mammoth around the red one’s form is the secondary art to the El Pindal artist. The El Pindal Cave art is the evidence of the first figurative art being in coastal pareidolia.
From the perspective of an animist, whether the geological forces of nature, as perceived through the mind of a human, or an actual tool in the hand of a human formed the figurative art is irrelevant. Both the animistic forces of the cosmos and humans are beings. In this mindset, first primary sources in the natural world or supernatural realms can be in themselves art or an inspiration for secondary art recreations of the same thus spiritually linking the two manifestations. The El Pindal cave art replica is our proof. We will rediscover more.
By extension one could come to recognize that the song of a sparrow neither belongs to the bird nor the air passing to and from the lungs. That song does not belong to the human who mimics and records it either. Or, that a reflection in a pool of water is not owned by the subject or the water. These examples may not hold up to modern legal statutes but easily fall within philosophies of the somewhat seamless animistic physical and spiritual realities who are often without significant personal possessions. Such perspectives may help us in understanding the primary sources of figurative art as well as where we come from.
Returning to the pictured pareidolia mammoths above, we can see them in the crashing surf only a few meters walk from the entrance to the El Pindal Cave. In a shallower sea by as much as 30 meters at the time of the El Pindal artists these pareidolia mammoths would have towered above a coastal plane. They couldn’t have been missed by the Ice Age artists.
These mammoth pareidolia on the coastline outside of the El Pindal Cave is the geographically closest inspiration this researcher has found to a painted/engraved Upper Paleolithic cave. Such inspirations in Northern Spain are typically more than a week’s walk away from the caves that harbor their impressions.
This El Pindal cave mammoths and terrestrial geological pareidolia observance is clearly within the scope of what Dalí had envisioned in his Don Quixote but not yet what Picasso had recognized through the Altamira masks.
There is a pareidolia mother bear and her club on the mountain Pica de Peñamellera seen in the above image from Alles, a town of 155 souls, in Asturias, Spain. The scene is closely replicated on a panel in the Las Chimeneas Cave, Cantabria, Spain that this researcher has named the Panel of the Bears in the absence of another name. Note the white limestone on Pica de Peñamellera which drew the Ice Age artist to work the same base material on the Las Chimeneas Cave panel. With this information, and art being in the eyes of the beholder, the pareidolia mother bear and her cub on Pica de Peñamellera are the primary source of the figurative art with the Las Chimeneas painting being the second. Like the pareidolia mammoths outside of the El Pindal cave being replicated on a wall in the cave, the Chimeneas Cave art becomes witness to the earlier recognition of the bears being seen in the eyes of the beholder.
The people of Alles had not recognized the pareidolia bears on Pica de Peñamellera in recent memory. This suggests that Pica de Peñamellera doesn’t obviously look like a mother bear with a cub sleeping on her head. When one compares Pica de Peñamellera with the picture from the Las Chimeneas Cave the mountain clearly has the appearance of a bear. The Ice Age artist brought Pica de Peñamellera to life as the mother bear and her cub.
This researcher’s quiet entrance into the town’s cafe searching for locally made blue cheese with cave and mountain images in hand stirred up the regular clientele. This researcher was kindly greeted by the gentleman behind the bar – Victor Manuel Noreiga – who shot the Pica de Peñamellera inset on this printed page.
This concept of animals in caves representing pareidolia geological formations outside of the caves can be found across Northern Spain as well as among indigenous peoples around the world. Conference presentations covering these and other caves/geological formations can be found in the following YouTube video recordings and PDF papers on Academia.edu. “The Origins of Cave Art” (PDF) at the Society for American Archaeology 2023 Conference, “Parallel Planes in Rock Art” (PDF) at the 2023 IFRAO Inter-Congress, “The Archaeometry of Space” (PDF) at the UISPP 2023 World Congress, “Living Landscapes in Ice Age Art” (PDF) at the International Association of Landscape Archaeology, and “Living Mountains in Iberian Cave Art” (PDF) at the 2022 The Arts in Society Conference.
Common Ground
The Gorham’s Etching and the Gallery of Discs introduced in the previous blog entry Rising Star Cave Engravings – Part I: The Underworld – Before Orion have common characteristics, which can be found in other Northern Iberian Ice Age art. One such characteristic is that they closely resemble pareidolia which can today be seen on large terrestrial geological formations.
The lines on Gorham’s Etching, in Gorham’s Cave, Gibraltar, are a close match to natural geological features on the nearby Mulhacen, which is the tallest mountain on the Iberian Peninsula, and a few days walk from the Rock of Gibraltar. See how the so-called pictured “hashtag” lines cross the faces of both.
Further evidence of the connection is a geological pareidolia horse head and neck on the face of Mulhacen that is replicated on Gorham’s Etching. See above how the Ice Age artist found naturally formed geological lines on the face of Mulhacen to surface the horse in profile.
A second geological pareidolia horse pictured above was recreated by the Gorham’s Etching artist from the horizontal lines on Mulhacen. The right eye, long white muzzle, and red tongue are exquisitely depicted. We can feel the horse’s agitation through the turned head, open muzzle and raised fore hooves. This horse is in the same relative position as the apparent horses on the Rising Star Panel A, which was previously discussed in Rising Star Cave Engravings – Part I: The Underworld – Before Orion.
The Gorham’s Etching is scaled with two hands, as demonstrated above, which are pictured to scale. One can see the metacarpals on the downward hand. Different arrangements of the fingers on these hands may have been hand gestures outlining the animals on the panel. An interesting study might be if the same hand relationship can be found on the Rising Star Cave Panel A. Such data is currently not available to the public.
Geological pareidolia inspirations for the Gallery of Discs can be found at both western North African and Gibraltar locations. There are too many images to include in this blog post. These relationships are discussed in the following two YouTube videos “Sacred Landscapes in Ice Age Art” (PDF) presented at the 2023 European Association of Archaeologists Annual Meeting and “Sacred Mountains in the Upper Paleolithic” (PDF) presented at the 2021 UISPP Congress. The “Sacred Landscapes in Rock Art” program includes Native American Lakota tradition examples for the same concept. This researcher recommends that a glass of wine be filled for the video viewing.
In these videos the reader will have recognized the geological pareidolia for the Gallery of Discs being sourced from the Rock of Gibraltar and on the face of Jebel Toubkal in Morocco. Jebel Toubkal was known in antiquity as “Mount Atlas” and is the tallest peak in western North Africa at 4,167 meters. Both geological formations are found in mythology from ancient times that apparently date to a much earlier period. The Ice Age cave panels inspired by them are monuments to many a hero’s journey of self-discovery.
Many of the depicted animals and structural relationships with each other on the Gallery of Discs, Gorham’s Etching and the Rising Star Cave panels were covered in Rising Star Cave Engravings – Part I: The Underworld – Before Orion. These includes the back-to-back marine animals as either a whale/shark, whale/dolphin and whale/flying fish; the pairs of mother and juvenile giraffes; the upright and walking bears; juvenile and adult elephants, among others.
The Rising Star Cave engravings, Gorham’s Etching and Gallery of Discs Homo sapiens artists were clearly aware of each other’s depicted images. The question remains is if any of these pareidolia geological animal sources are from South Africa? Time for a refill of the wine glass.
Still in Africa
We return to the Rising Star Cave Panel A and Panel B above from where we found a long list of animals, including giraffes, elephants, a tortoise, a reptile, a bear, a connected whale and shark, a pig, a hare, a badger, among others in Rising Star Cave Engravings – Part I: The Underworld – Before Orion. The only depicted animals on this list which were definitely not in Europe during the time of the Gorham’s Etching and Gallery of Discs Ice Age artists were the giraffes. The images of these giraffes from both Rising Star Cave Panel A and Panel B as well as the Iberian caves are shown below.
The Rising Star Cave Panel A giraffes are engraved horizontally across while the Panel B giraffes are depicted vertically. The head of the Rising Star Panel A mother giraffe closely lays on top of her juvenile’s head and their bodies overlap each other. Whereas the head of the Panel B mother giraffes reaches out to intersect that of her juvenile. These are two distinctly different scenes.
How the heads/necks of the giraffes overlap each other and are built within the lines on the Rising Star Cave Panel A closely parallel (no pun intended) the giraffes on the Gorham’s Etching and Gallery of Discs, all pictured above. The long necks of the Gallery of Discs giraffes similarly extend across the panel while the Gorham’s Etching is on a flat platform. The orientation of the platform does not obviously designate up or down. The lines on the north-west face of Mulhacen do give us an orientation to work with. With a directional starting point of north-west for the Gorham’s Etching view of the earlier pictured pareidolia horses on the face of Mulhacen to the Gorham’s Etching we can find a southern view of the depicted giraffes on that panel.
Returning to our question of terrestrial geological pareidolia in South Africa we find a close match between the Rising Star Cave Panel B mother giraffe and Sentinel Peak in the Drakensberg Mountains of South Africa. One can see the mother giraffe’s long neck, right eye and extended muzzle. These features were the primary sources of art in the minds of the Cave of Bones artists.
The Panel B juvenile giraffe is absent in this natural geological pareidolia and will be discussed further in the upcoming Blog III. The similarities between the Sentinel Peak pareidolia and Panel B mother giraffe are extraordinary. Sentinel Peak is currently about a 70 hour/306 km walk from the Rising Star Cave and within easy access to each other. Based on the size of Sentinel Peak we can firmly determine that the geological pareidolia of the giraffe is entirely carved by the forces of nature.
Sentinel Peak must have been a spiritual place to Homo sapiens 35,000 years ago. We might describe this connection as “magical” but to the Ice Age animist they are integral to understanding the cosmic order. This researcher has looked for any current indigenous lore about giraffes at Sentinel Peak but has found none. Sentinel Peak is a well-known site, standing guard at the western route to Tugela Falls, the second-highest waterfall in the world.
The Elephants in the Mountain
The Rising Star Cave Panel B giraffes appear to overlap with a pair of elephants, presumably a mother and her juvenile, such that are unclear as pareidolia on Sentinel Peak. Panel B also has apparent mother and juvenile elephants that do not easily fit into the Sentinel Peak picture either as overlapping with the giraffes or standing on their own.
These problems of both the Rising Star Cave Panel A and Panel B elephants may be solved with another pareidolia geological formation, and primary source of art, nearby Sentinel Peak and at the ladder climb up to the top of Tugela Falls. That section the rock has been named by this researcher Face of the Elephants in the apparent absence of another known name. Here we can view pareidolia of both elephants as well as the head of the juvenile giraffe on Rising Star Panel A. There are vertical lines running horizontally to the viewer’s right and in the shadows. We might obtain additional pictorial information for Panel A in this space. Please send a photo of this area if you can take one during the upcoming summer climbs.
From this perspective, we can recognize that the Rising Star Cave Panel A is a relief. The Cave of Bones artist carved back the walls of the panel to create the rounded surfaces and protruded head of the juvenile giraffe.
Animistic Geography
What were the wider purposes of the Rising Star Cave panels connecting them to Iberian caves? The duplication of characters across the Rising Star Cave panels do not suggest creating art just for the sake of replicating primary sources. There may have been a spiritual connection between the underworld and terrestrial plane. Seasonal rituals could have been conducted. The panels might have been teaching tools to apprentices over thousands of years. These could be among mankind’s oldest recorded sacred spaces – temples of faith if you will. All of the proposed explanations are conceivable possibilities, but do not explain why Iberian panels have depictions of giraffes derived from South African geological pareidolia. The reverse for the why of South African panels depicting European bears is not explained with these possibilities either.
A partial measurable answer is the panels are geographic terrestrial maps. We can see the animals depicted on the Gallery of Discs are oriented in different directions and geographically segmented on the panel, as can be viewed in the animistic map above from my video Ice Age Mapmakers? (PDF) presented at the American Association of Geographers (AAG) 2021 annual meeting. When the panel is turned 45 degrees counterclockwise, the Iberian lynx and horse are at the top, the marine animals in the middle and the African elephants, Barbary ape and giraffes on the bottom.
At first glance such a map may seem unusual for the reader. One’s eyebrows shouldn’t be raised too high though. The practice can be found widely in ancient maps where animals were pictured to show the uniqueness of an area. We today mark our sports teams, schools, states, provinces and countries with animals. Most of those mascot animals project strength. This is an animistic view of the world which we have retained from deep into the Ice Age.
Note that the lengths of the giraffe necks on the Gallery of Discs point directly south which is the same direction as previously established for the giraffes on Gorham’s Etching relative to the face of Mulhacen. This is also the same direction of view for both the large pareidolia giraffe on the face of Sentinel Peak and the Face of the Elephants on the route to Tugela Falls in South Africa. The pareidolia on these natural geological formations along with the Gallery of Discs, Gorham’s Etching, Rising Star Panel A and Panel B are functional maps.
Each visual perspective of the animals on the four panels are the directions of view. The Gallery of Discs appears differently than the Gorham’s Etching and the Rising Star Cave Panel A because the former is a rectangle and the latter two are more squared. Panel B is rectangular with all of the characters appearing to be stacked on top of each other either facing to the right or left. The Panel B mother giraffe is in a train of characters that ends at Sentinel Peak.
These are in fact the oldest currently known maps. They are logistically incomplete though, as presented in this blog post, to navigate either the land mass between Iberia and South Africa or along the eastern Atlantic Ocean. The missing navigational aids will be described in the forthcoming Bernie’s Blog “Rising Star Cave Engravings” – Part III: The Sky World. My apologies in advance for the seasonal cliffhanger.
Revising the Narrative
Through the evidence provided in this blog post and the previous Rising Star Cave Engravings – Part I: The Underworld – Before Orion, we have long moved past Dr. Berger’s question from his 2020 New Scientist interview of “someone had been in that chamber, and stepped on this material, and I didn’t know how recently.” The answer is definitively what we today categorize as Aurignacian Homo sapiens. Is there a more appropriate term for this culture now that we are no longer just looking at our time in Europe?
We have found an inter-period when Homo sapiens were neither European nor African. We were travelers between both and perhaps other continents. Might there be other terrestrial pareidolia sources that inspired as well as aided the Ice Age artists between Northern Spain and the southern limit of the African continent? Could there be other cave art that also describes all of these places and animals unique to their ranges? Are there maps on cave walls of more distant regions that have yet to be recognized? There is the endless enigma of Ice Age art.
The discovery of the Rising Star Cave engravings came as a complete surprise to this researcher who was previously working along the lines that the giraffe on the Gallery of Discs could represent unfound pareidolia in western North Africa near to the identified animals on the panel and their pareidolia source at Jebel Toubkal. Perhaps, the Ice Age artist/travelers confined their perspectives to the then limits of the habitable northern and southern extremes. These people may not have had the ability to trek much further north of the Iberian Peninsula into glacial Europe. They probably didn’t paddle small craft south across the equally treacherous Southern Ocean to Antarctica.
There is still the question of “firsts” which is the key to media coverage, scientific notoriety as well as national pride. Who, other than parents, celebrates a second-place finish? The question of precedence among the four panels – Gorham’s Etching, Gallery of Discs and two in Rising Star Cave – discussed is difficult to determine. Each panel contains structural elements and unique geographical animal characters of the others.
The most likely solution is there were observations of these structural elements and animals before any of the four panels were created. Those structural elements are partly geological pareidolia on the Iberian Peninsula, in western North Africa and South Africa. Any earlier dating among these four panels would only demonstrate that the art was previously engraved or painted and not the primary source of the other three.
Message in the Rocks
Emerging from the dark cave, we have fully let go of Homo naledi as the Cave of Bones artists. Take a moment for a deep breath and slowly blow out the feeling of relief. In that moment of clarity, we can recognize what may truly be a message from the Ice Age artists. Such is that the continued analyses by the authors of the Rising Star Cave papers and their detractors are missing something in their approach to the engravings. What appears to not have been accounted for is the ability to better recognize characters embedded and overlapping on Ice Age panels and the same trait can recognize pareidolia in natural geological formations.
This is not just a neurological or physical ability. The characteristic is also an animistic mindset where spiritual beings can also be perceived in the pareidolia of those natural rock formations. We are not personally required to believe the wind has a voice, other non-human animals are our kin, or even that some people see faces in clouds and animals outlined among the stars. Animism is the primary source of both Dalí’s Don Quixote and Picasso’s Les Demoiselles d’Avignon. We cannot discount that many in the distant past through to our present time have such perceptions. These animistic visions, projected by Ice Age peoples onto the walls of caves, are our spiritual roots. At the same time, they are foundations to what we today are rediscovering in the name of science.
One more blog entry on the Rising Star panels coming soon, as follows…
Bernie’s Blog “Rising Star Cave Engravings” – Part III: The Sky World
A preview of the “The Sky World” concept for the Rising Star panels can be seen with Iberian caves in short videos, such as The Great Bear, as well as longer presentations, including the American Anthro/Anthropology of Consciousness talk Altered States in Ice Age Art?, American Association of Geographers 2023 Annual Meeting Mapping Hercules – A Geographic Teaching Tool, UISPP 2021 Congress Sacred Mountains in the Paleolithic, European Society for Astronomy in Culture (SEAC) 2021 Upper Paleolithic Constellations, The 2022 Arts in Society Conference Living Mountains in Iberian Cave Art and other videos posted to the Before Orion site. PDFs for all of these conference presentations can be downloaded from Bernie Taylor’s Academia.edu page.
Bernie Taylor is the author of Before Orion: Finding the Face of the Hero (2017). He regularly presents his work at scientific conferences and is interviewed on podcast channels.
Explore more examinations of Ice Age cave art and other provocative posts from Bernie’s Blog.
