In France, earliest-ever wall art appealed to hunters ... and lovers

Researchers in France have uncovered what may be the earliest evidence of interior decorating in Europe, engravings on a stone block that date to some 37,000 years ago. The art is associated with the first modern humans to migrate from Africa to Europe – the Aurignacian culture.

The find – on the underside of a 1.5-ton limestone slab that once acted as the ceiling of a natural stone shelter – included depictions of animals, as well as representations of female genitalia.

The art is slightly older than the previous underground record-holders, adorning the walls of a cave known as Grotte Chauvet in southeastern France. But that art – drawings of horses, cave lions, rhino, and other animals – appears deep inside what would have been a lightly trafficked cave.

The limestone-slab art, by contrast, is tied to a shelter used by reindeer hunters. It's a site known as Abri Castanet that also hosts the remains of ornament workshops, bone and antler tools, and fireplaces.

In short, the ceiling art was tied into everyday life, notes Randall White, a New York University anthropologist who led the team reporting the results in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Aurignacian art at the site – which includes stone and bone carvings, beads, and other rock paintings in addition to the wall etchings – “is not just about inventing graphic expression, or inventing sculpture,” Dr. White says. It's part of a larger explosion in innovation that took place in a fairly short time as Aurignacians moved north into colder, unfamiliar territory already occupied by Neanderthals, who had been there for 250,000 years. The rapid evolution in art and personal adornment may have served at least as much as a means of identifying “them” and “us” as it did satisfying a craving for Stone Age style.

“We often imagine that it must have been the Neanderthals who had to change in the face of these incoming modern humans,” he says. “But in fact it looks much more like the modern humans were changing in the face of this well-ensconced population of people who knew the terrain.”

Indeed, he adds, the evidence shows that artifacts associated with the Aurignacians changed more in the first 100 years of their first appearance in the archaeological record than Neanderthal artifacts had undergone in 100,000 years. Innovation and adaptability may well have played a key role in the extinction of the Neanderthal – a process that took a mere 5,000 years – and their replacement by modern humans, White suggests.

The innovations ranged from increasingly effective ways to attach spearheads to the spears' shafts to carving the earliest human-female figurine –shaped from a mammoth tusk – and the earliest musical instrument – a bone flute – yet found on the continent.

The Abri Castanet site sits on a slope that helps mark the Vézère River Valley in southwestern France. Although researchers first excavated the site in 1911, no one had worked on it since the mid 1920s. Over the intervening years, it became a garbage dump for a farmhouse located upslope.

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