It is a legacy without words or instructions but intensely charged with meaning and emotions. Lurking in deep darkness, painted or engraved, these images have crossed the mists of time without losing any of their evocative power or their magic. Traced, for some, more than forty millennia ago – a veritable temporal abyss that makes one dizzy. Since their discovery by speleologists or by chance on a child’s stroll, these frescoes have never ceased to make our imagination run wild. Horses, reindeer or bison, sometimes strikingly realistic, seem to float on the rock, sometimes accompanied by human silhouettes resembling ghosts and, here and there, cabalistic signs. The natural reliefs of the cavities that shelter them are often enhanced with pigments or incised to evoke who a breast, who a vulva, and there are also bones stuck here and there in orifices.
Anthropologist and prehistorian fond of the leather headgear of Indiana Jones, specialist in several mythologies from Africa and Poitou, Jean-Loïc Le Quellec has devoted his life to trying to unravel their mystery. In “the original Cave », it offers us the substantial marrow of this quest, condensed into a monolith of nearly 900 pages, but so rich and well chiselled that reading is lively, full of twists, humor and erudition. The book is read with jubilation, especially when it invalidates, without depreciating them, the thousand and one theories.
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