The Gravettian
25,000 – 35,000 yrs ago · 12 sites
The age of the hand stencil. Across Europe people pressed hands to the rock and blew ochre around them — at Gargas, at Cosquer whose entrance now lies beneath the sea — while mammoths and ibex filled the walls.
The World Then
A cold, mammoth-hunted Europe of vast plains and long winters. Bands follow the herds beneath the advancing ice, and a shared culture stretches from the Atlantic to the Russian plain — the age of the great 'Venus' figurines and of hands pressed to cave walls.
The Art
The stencilled hand is the signature: pigment blown around spread fingers at Gargas and Cosquer, sometimes with joints seemingly missing — ritual, frostbite or code, no one knows. Fingers drawn through soft cave clay carry animals across the dark, and at Cussac the engravings share their cave with the dead.
What They Depicted
Mammoths surge to prominence alongside horses and ibex; Gargas's walls carry more than two hundred hands — men's, women's and children's. Far beyond Europe, at Bhimbetka and on Murujuga's boulders, wholly separate traditions are already generations deep.
Seeing It Today
Gargas admits visitors to the original cave — standing before those hands is among rock art's most direct encounters. Cosquer, its entrance drowned by the risen sea, is experienced through the superb Cosquer Méditerranée reconstruction in Marseille.
