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Cave Art |
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In 2003 the first 12 examples of Palaeolithic cave art ever discovered in Britain were found - at Cresswell Crags, in the Creswell Crags Heritage Area between the Peak District National Park and Sherwood Forest.
Another fantastic discovery was made a year later, inside 'Church Hole', where 80 bison, horse and birds charge across the walls and ceilings, carved out by artists who were living in harsh conditions just 19 miles from a glacier which was still carving out the contours of the landscape. Creswell Heritage Trust's manager creatively dubbed the cave "Sistine Chapel of the Ice Age".
The Victorians (who used Church Hole as a cattle shelter) discovered that early people had lived in these caves. Most of the cave had been bricked up, but even the entrance was full of evidence. Frank Tebbet found a woolly rhino tooth (but it wan't identified immediately) and local enthusiasts collected the ancient bones they found sticking up through the cave floor.
Many pre-historic flint tools and split bones were found in 'Mother Grundy's Parlour'. Robin Hood's Cave yielded evidence that woolly rhinoceroses and arctic hares were hunted and trapped here - and now a bone engraved with a horse head has been found in Robin Hood's Cave. In a prehistoric hyena den two more artworks have survived: a bone engraved with a human figure and an ivory pin with an etched pattern.
Scientists have had to re-think their assumptions about the artistic 'evolution' of early man, following recent archaeological discoveries. Ever since Darwin proposed the theory of evolution, there has been a popular assumption that artistic ability evolved over time.
Now things have changed. Complex drawings, engravings, paintings and sculptures found at even the earliest human archaeological sites prove the opposite. In fact, the evidence is that man posessesed sophisticated creative and artistic ability from the moment he first came on the scene - or as Christians might say: from the moment he was 'created'.
For many Christians who have taken an interest in the subject, this comes as no surprise. The belief that God created man in his own image, and not as part of an evolutionary process, suggests that mankind whould reflect (although imperfectly) the creativity of his maker.
Showing great artistic skill, cave painters used a kind of perspective, with foreground objects partially obscuring objects further away. They represented people, animals and contellations. They even created narrative pictures to tell stories - often about hunting.
Some of the most recent cave art discoveries were in the Derbyshire Peak District, at the Cresswell Crags, just 20 miles from Matlock on the Nottinghamshire - Derbyshire border.
At the Cresswell Crags, a limestone gorge gouged with many caves, you can see a different kind of cave art: rock engravings. Here the cavemen engravers designed their images to take artistic advantage of the hollows and cracks in the cave surface. They probably worked in the mornings, when the early morning sunlight would shine into the caves and highlight the irregularities they were looking for. Dr Sergio Ripoll, a Spanish scientist visiting the site reported:
'The good natural light both in April and June of this year, and the realisation that the Ice Age artists who were visiting Church Hole were actually modifying the natural shapes in the limestone, has enabled us to see many new animal figures'.
Cave engravings aren't usually coloured like cave paintings - so they can be quite difficult to decipher. The Cresswell Crags engravings are very worn, but the Cresswell Crags website should give you an idea of what to expect before you visit.
