Koske caves

2024 Author: Seth Attwood | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-16 15:55

In 1985, deep-sea diver Henri Cosquer discovered a narrow crevice in the rock at the bottom of the Calanque Morges near Marseille. It turned out to be the entrance to the tunnel. Having discovered the entrance to an underground corridor filled with water at a depth of thirty-seven meters, Anri Coske did not even imagine what amazing discoveries await him inside.

Before that, however, it was still far away. The corridor turned out to be upward and very long - its length was about 175 m. To overcome this distance, the diver had to dive over and over again for six years.

When in 1991. he finally reached the opposite end of the corridor, then found himself in an underground hall more than fifty meters wide. The hall was above sea level and was only slightly flooded. There he found many images drawn and scratched in the wall - there were horses, deer, bison, handprints … On the opposite side from the entrance, Koske discovered a mine, a dark abyss. Its depth was about 14 meters.

Now this cave is known throughout the world as the Koske Cave. But how can specialists get there, if even an experienced diver took six years to overcome the 170-meter pass? The way out was found. A group of scuba divers set off for the cave, led by the largest French expert on rock art, Jean Clotte, from a ship moored nearby.

The scuba divers brought the necessary equipment to the underground hall, with the help of which the operator took many beautiful photographs. Samples of paint were also taken so that radiocarbon analysis could be carried out and the age of the drawings could be established. This is how a new object appeared on the archaeological map of France.

The newly discovered cave attracted adventurers, but not all the pages of the history of its exploration were joyful. In the summer of 1992. three scuba divers who wanted to get to the Palaeolithic wonders were killed. After this incident, the entrance to the cave was closed. Today, only specialists studying primitive art can get access there.

In addition to the images themselves, the amazing grotto asked its researchers one more question: how did it happen that Paleolithic artists worked in a cave, the entrance to which is under water at a depth of 37 meters?

The answer is actually quite simple. About 9-10 thousand years ago, the era of the last glaciation ended on Earth and huge ice masses began to melt. As a result, the sea level has risen significantly. At the time when the drawings were created, the entrance to the cave was on land, 11 kilometers from the coast.

When the drawings were properly studied, it turned out that by age they can be divided into two groups. Those that are older were created 27-28 thousand years ago, and the "youngest" - 18-19 thousand years ago. In general, the most ancient finds clearly bearing traces of human activity - stones with traces of artificial processing - were found in the town of Koobi Fora in Kenya, in a layer of volcanic soil, whose age is estimated at almost 3 million years.

Therefore, it is believed that the Paleolithic era - the ancient Stone Age - began about three million years ago. And the late Paleolithic lasted from 11 to 35 thousand years ago.

At this time, people already lived on all continents, and it was to this period that the first monuments of art belong, including rock paintings and numerous female figurines - "Paleolithic Venuses". About 11 thousand years ago, a new era begins for mankind - people learn to cultivate the land and make pottery. And in the 5-4th millennium BC. in the Nile Valley and in Mesopotamia, the first civilizations were born. So, all the paintings found in the Koske Cave were created during the Upper Paleolithic.

Most of the "ancient" group of drawings are handprints. A total of 55 of them were counted, their age is about 28 thousand years. All of them are located in the eastern part of the cave, they marked the path from the entrance to the large mine. They are made in either black or brown paint. At that time, paint was made on the basis of natural dyes - chalk, ocher, coal, which were mixed with animal fat.

Technologically, these “hands” were created in two different ways: either they dipped their hands into paint and then applied them to the rock, or they painted them “using a stencil”, i.e. they applied a clean hand to a damp wall, and around it they sprayed paint diluted in water or in the form of a powder with their mouth or with the help of a bone tube.

The strangest feature of these drawn hands is the absence of phalanges on some or even all of the fingers except the thumb. Such "circumcised" hands have been found in other caves and are still a mystery to scientists. What does it mean? Were the fingers really missing or were they just curled up? And why? When such images were first found in the Gargas Cave, the founder of modern science of primitiveness, Abbot Henri Breuil, suggested that the absence of the phalanges of the fingers was due to mutilation.

It seemed logical - primitive tribes lived in very harsh conditions and could lose fingers as a result of injury, gangrene or frostbite. But as new images were discovered, this version lost its supporters - it is unlikely that the similar features of handprints found in different places could be explained simply by chance. In addition, it has been established that none of the known diseases can damage the fingers in this way - after all, the thumb is always intact.

The assumption that the fingers were simply bent is also questionable - in this case, the paint that got under the bent phalanges should have left specific marks on the wall. Perhaps the phalanges were deliberately amputated for sacred purposes, and the drawings represent a message in a conventional "language" we do not understand or are associated with some kind of ritual.

The people of the Paleolithic hunted for food, and, probably, all Paleolithic painting is associated with hunting rituals, it is not for nothing that animals usually became the subject of the image of a Paleolithic artist. The most important argument against this version is that until now no remains of people from the Upper Paleolithic period have been found, whose phalanges of the fingers would have been amputated.

Pictures of animals are scattered throughout the hall, there are more than a hundred of them and they belong to different periods. Among them there are older ones, whose age is 24-26 thousand years, and there are younger ones - about 18 thousand years. They are made in a contour manner, as a rule, with black paint. There are also relief images, they are not drawn, but carved into the surface of the rock. The animal's mane is often drawn with strokes, short parallel lines.

Such patterns can no longer be created simply by hand, the paint was applied using a brush, consisting of a tubular bone, at the tip of which a bunch of wool was fixed. The dimensions of these "canvases" are half a meter - a meter in length, the largest bison turned out to be in the eastern part of the hall, its length is 1 m 20 cm.

In addition to bison, horses walk along the walls of the Koske cave - more than thirty horses, chamois, deer, fallow deer, stone goats, various representatives of the cat family. A characteristic feature of these ancient pictures - the animals on them are massive and "pot-bellied", they often have large bellies and disproportionately thin legs.

Another feature that is often found in general in Paleolithic images is the standard technique when the horns - of a bison, deer, goat - are depicted in front, full face, although the animal itself is drawn in profile. Researchers are very interested in such trifles, because it is they that open the door to the perception of the ancient man.

But the most interesting images in our underwater cave are marine animals. There are fish, seals, jellyfish (or octopuses). The scientists were especially amused and puzzled by the strange creatures painted on the wall in the northern part of the hall. They have large round bodies, small heads and funny limbs sticking out to the sides - either paws or wings. Turtles, penguins, and even dinosaurs were recognized in these mysterious creatures.

Today, researchers have finally come to a common opinion - a Paleolithic artist captured a wingless auk. This bird is now extinct, or rather, exterminated, but it was found in Europe in the 19th century. The wingless auk really looked very much like a penguin, it could not fly and felt better in the water than on land.

There are images in the cave, which they still cannot interpret - mysterious animals, geometric shapes. In the eastern part of the hall, the lines cut into the rock resemble a man who has fallen on his back, stretching his arms up and raising his legs.