The Horse by Wendy Williams

Author:Wendy Williams
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780374709778
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux

The ethereal reindeer and horse of El Castillo Cave (Courtesy of Paul Bahn)

We can tell from this art that, although horse population numbers were dropping, horses continued to be culturally important. Near Duruthy, France, on the eastern side of the Pyrenees, researchers have discovered what some say is a “shrine” to the horse. The Duruthy shrine—or more conservatively called an “ode to the horse” (as “shrine” implies religious worship)—was created at roughly the same time as Ekain’s horse art and as El Castillo’s horse-and-reindeer pairing. Duruthy researchers have discovered thousands of Paleolithic tools and artifacts at this site, including a horse carved out of sandstone. His muscular shoulders and head, with glaring eye and ears flattened against his head, make him appear to be lunging forward in a threatening posture, like the snaking stallion in the Wyoming mountains.

Evidence of this late-Paleolithic idolization of the horse can be found in the Russian cave of Kapova in the Ural Mountains, six thousand miles to the east of the Pyrenees. Roughly fourteen thousand years old, Kapova is situated in what’s now a nature preserve located north of the Black and Caspian Seas. The cave shows well-nourished horses drawn in red ocher. They have thick necks, plump rumps, and delicate heads. The Kapova horses do not interact with other animals. There is no large scene or story line, as at Chauvet. Instead, the animals are friezelike. One horse trots in front of other animals, looking straight ahead. We don’t know if he was meant to be shown as the leader of the animals or if the artist just set out to sketch various individuals in no special order. Elsewhere in Kapova there’s another line of animals. Here, the horse jogs in the middle of the line, between a mammoth and a woolly rhinoceros.

Another frieze of horses from this time, called the Magdalenian, was done in one of my favorite rock overhangs in France—the Cap Blanc site, located not far from the town of Les Eyzies. This site is still open to the public, and visiting it is a simple matter of buying a ticket. Tours are given at certain specified times, and since I had an hour before I was scheduled to visit, I decided to hike. I descended a narrow path leading from the overhang to a stream below and found myself in an idyllic valley. Across the way I saw another cave entrance. Inside was another beautifully carved horse head. Had the people living at Cap Blanc fifteen thousand years ago decided to go visiting, it would have taken them only minutes to walk down their hill, cross the stream, and enter this other cave.

Why were so many horses created by artists in this area? Were the people who lived at both of these sites members of one extended family who had made the horse their family crest? During the Pleistocene, the relationship between horses and humans may well have been similar to the relationship between Inuit and whales, or between early North Americans and bison.

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