A Paleolithic Bison in the Massif de Fontainebleau?


A tracing showing the broadened frieze in Ségognole 3.

A = the top limit of the white concretion on the cave ceiling that suggests pubic hair,

B = the lower limit of anthropogenic modification to the bison’s caudal groove, which doubles as the right hip of a woman’s pelvis. The left hip is formed by the edge of the wall to the left of the vulva.

C = the anthropogenically flaked zone,

D = a zone showing polish,

E = both a single manmade groove touching the visual limit that represents the proposed bison’s dorsal line, and an incised cross further to the the right, which also seems associated with the dorsal line,

F = the visual limit that forms the bison’s back, hump, head silhouette, and front leg when the viewer is positioned in the only place with enough headroom to sit upright, which is directly in front of the panel with the vulva and horses,

G = Four incisions on the ceiling directly above the bison’s chest,

H = the 1st and 2nd shifts in contour that cause the area above to be read as a bas-relief of a bison. These form the ventral line of the sculpture.

Areas that have exfoliated are indicated within dotted lines. The center of the proposed bison’s back is also marked by a series of light parallel incisions, but they are not as clearly anthropogenic as the two motifs marking the dorsal line (E) or the 4 incisions over the ribcage.

(Caldwell)

***


Around 1995, my eye became disturbed by an apparent lack of compositional balance among the engravings that had been pointed out to me in Ségognole 3 - a grotto in the Fontainebleau Forest. During a visit to the cave with my friend, Laurent Valois, a member of GERSAR - the association dedicated to studying the region’s rock art – we examined all the elements that we knew of from a photograph on display at the Regional Museum of Prehistory in Nemours, France.


The main art panel, which was largely discovered by one of GERSAR’s founders, Christian Wagneur, in 1981, consists of two walls, divided from the ceiling by deep creases, that meet in a corner. These natural fissures originally tapered downwards into the corner, creating the impression of a vulva between thighs. There was even a vertical gully eroded down the center, creating the impression of a vaginal slit. The vulva was a “readymade” with such a suggestive mineral concretion over the incised triangle that there had been no need to illustrate pubic hair. The engraver only had to reinforce the cave’s features to mark the fact that he had seen a being “incarnate” in the cave’s natural forms - and did so by incising the central and righthand cracks to make them more regular.  

  

The main art panel of Ségognole 3 with the eroded remnants of a horse’s head and neck on the left, a central vulva under a mineral concretion that suggests pubic hair, and a finely incised horse on the righthand "thigh". But the panel also includes a deep incision on the right that has been dismissed until now as a mere framing device. In one of its two figurative readings, it is a kind of frame, since its curve forms a right hip, which mirrors the line formed by the visual limit of the wall to the left of the vulva, which naturally becomes the left hip, with the vulva in the middle. Another notable feature is the fact that water dripping from the ceiling in the tunnel beyond the engraved wall forms a rivulet that runs two meters down into a small hollow, where it disappears oddly instead of forming a pool. This natural drain is directly behind and connected to the vulva by a flaw in the rock, causing the vulvar slits to “sweat” profusely. Needless-to-say, this trait, which probably accounts for the pubic concretion as well, may have made the panel more suggestive and life-like.



The only problem was that the bilaterally symmetrical composition had another type of engraving, which was in no way suggested by the cave’s topography – a finely incised horse on the right “thigh” - with nothing, as far as we knew from the Museum’s photograph, to echo it on the left. Even though this animal was faint, eroded, and just 32.5 cm long from muzzle to tail, one could just make out its mouth, nostril, eye, mane, graceful back and belly lines, and four legs. Like the rest of the elongated animal, the legs were so naturalistic, despite their spindly stylization, that they had fine details like hocks and were even shown in perspective. I couldn’t help but wonder whether some Upper Paleolithic women had such elegant horses tattooed on the inside of their legs.


Racing from one speculation to another, I also wondered why such a symmetrical composition had been left lop-sided – with an engraved animal on one “thigh” but nothing on the other. From an artistic point of view, it didn’t seem to make sense. The empty “thigh” was so eroded, though, because of its greater proximity to the closest entrance and elements, that a lightly incised motif might have been largely erased. But what if traces of the motif could still be discerned?


I mentioned my concern about the composition’s lack of balance to Laurent, the author of a GERSAR monograph on another important cave 1, and suggested that we should be looking for the remnants of a second animal on the left. 


He squirmed out, giving me more room to make a quick study of the suspicious zone. Parts of it had exfoliated, destroying the original surface, while the rest was so stippled and pocked from weathering that it was hard to distinguish the rounded trace of a washed-out incision. But there it was – looped and closed off by a line – a muzzle! – and there was the bottom of the neck. A second equine head!

 

I immediately retrieved my friends and showed them the remains of the horse’s head and neck. The next time I met Alain Bénard, the president of GERSAR, I told him that I’d found a second horse and he said that Wagneur had mentioned finding some lines on the left but that they had been “indecipherable”. Many years later, when Laurent was preparing the inventory form for Ségognole 3 for the regional archaeological authority or DRAC, he therefore recorded, incorrectly, that I had found the little eroded head.


   

Another photo, in white diode light, showing the relationship between the cave’s identified art panel and the deep, sinuous, nearly vertical incision on the right. Although the incision and flaked zone above it have been previously dismissed as a framing device, as we look to the right, we’ll see that they are actually the caudal groove and sculpted contour of a largely “readymade” sculpture of a 190 cm long reclining bison, which appears to be life-size in the small chamber.   

 

In fact, the second horse was almost certainly found by Wagneur shortly after he noticed the complete one. In 1984, Georges Nelh recorded that one could “distinguish another, very effaced curvilinear line belonging to the head of a second equine” “to the left of the fissures” (Nehl 1984 p. 308)2. The next year, Jacques Tarrête reported that, in addition to the complete horse and vulva, Ségognole 3 contained “numerous fissures in the sandstone, whose traces, it seems, were regularized, as well as a heavily eroded engraving of the head of another horse” (Tarrête 1985)3. So the cave’s inventory description written by Laurent will have to be revised to cite the horse’s original discoverer.


But that does not affect the story’s point, which sets the stage for the proposal of another image by showing how the recognition of compositional gaps or inconsistencies can lead to the rediscovery of an obscured element. The same approach that led me to re-find the horse head applies to a third, much bigger animal that I missed that very same day – even though one of its elements - a long sinuous line to the right of the clearer horse - also bothered me from the start. The line, which took the path of another existing crack, is just as deeply incised as the ones forming the vulva, making it an important compositional element in a figurative ensemble. In his Master’s thesis on the cave, Alain Bénard suggested that it might be a framing device3. This turns out to be true, but perhaps not in the way he thought, since Paleolithic art is rarely if ever framed by artificial borders. More troubling still, the long sinuous groove had the organic flow usually associated with Paleolithic portrayals of humans and animals.  


Which made me brood. The next time I visited the cave, I realized that the long incision might be part of an image that was:

1)on the same scale as the line – in other words, large – and

2)a readymade in the same figurative style as the vulva.

If so, we should be looking for something that only needed a few enhancements like the deepened line to complete or "fix" an impression. If the same artist had also produced the vulva, which used the same method and technique, then the image – quite possibly of an animal - that would be suggested by the adjacent contours would be captured with the same succinctness – a concision typical of Upper Paleolithic art. 


The deep incision that forms the outline of the right hip and rear of the postulated bison. The furrow’s stepped cross-section and saw-tooth right edge indicate that the groove was incised on two occasions, giving it a double bevel, and finally scraped along the right edge, knocking off a succession of chips. The hammered and flaked zone at the top of the incision was done to remove stone that reached the ceiling, breaking the desired contour of a bison’s rump. On close inspection, the area one third of the way down the picture on the right shows signs of pecking and polishing to make the haunch curve in the manner of a living bison’s. Finally, note the sudden color change from pale gray on the incision’s left to brown on its right.  Although possibly natural, the color change may have influenced the positioning of the incision or be the last remnant of pigment applied to the bison.


 

No sooner had I reasoned this way, than two naturalistic interpretations became clear. First, it was obvious that the sinuous line was the mirror image of the edge of the left wall, so that the two formed the naturalistic contours of a woman’s two hips. The groove therefore completed a pelvis. Alain Bénard was right that the line formed a framing device, but it was entirely naturalistic and in keeping with the image, rather than an artistic conceit.


But that still didn’t explain the chipping above the groove. The second image that used the same line was a life-size bison lying on its side. The bestial odalisque was naturalistic down to a bearded chin, hump in the right place behind the head, perfect sway in the back, concave ventral line, and, of course, the deeply incised groove that now made sense either as the back of the rear leg or as the bison’s tail. The top of its rump had been enhanced by the removal of a visually disruptive extension to the ceiling (see the detail) that had broken the otherwise perfect line of its back. Below the flaked rump, a concave zone showed signs of pecking and polishing to improve the swale between the bison’s back and haunch. Just as I’d reasoned, the rest of the image was largely – if not entirely - composed of natural relief that almost perfectly reflected the mounds and hollows of a sleeping or dead bison’s bones and musculature.

Traces of anthropogenic modification in and around the groove include the removal of large flakes around its summit (FN), creating the artificial platform where the top of the deep incision starts, as well as signs of incising (IN) and chipping (Ch) within the groove itself, giving it a stepped morphology with a double bevel and saw-toothed right edge. (Caldwell)



Like many other Paleolithic artists, the Ségognole sculptor(s) did not feel a need to “complete” images once they were “clarified”. Thus the “hips” next to the vulva have no bottoms, just merging into the cave. The ventral line of the proposed bison is similar, since it is suggested by a concretionary line and change in relief rather than the “overkill” of an additional incision. There are many cases where it can be shown that the addition of an artificial line where a feature was already suggested by a natural contour was avoided by the makers of Paleolithic imagery, apparently because they felt that the artifice was superfluous and wanted their works to grow from and merge with the surrounding rock.


Once the deeply incised groove and flaking were seen as the bison’s rear, truly completing it, it also became obvious how lifelike the bison would have appeared if it had been draped with a pelt or painted with pigments that were abraded away on this ridge of the cave floor. Oddly enough, the much later prehistoric art in a cavity just two meters away is unusual in having representations of 2 quadrupeds on a similarly raised section of the floor. The placement - which has seemed unique until now - may mean that its makers were still aware of a huge sculpture of a quadruped on a floor ridge of Ségognole 3, linking the adjacent caves thematically just as strongly as the fact that they each have a motif that can be interpreted as a vulva.


The proposed bison also fits Paleolithic associations elsewhere of bison, horse and sexual imagery that were observed by Annette Laming–Emperaire5 and André Leroi-Gourhan6, so, although this may be the first known example of a bison in the Fontainebleau Forest or even the Ile-de-France, it actually makes perfect sense.

 

Even though I’ve been to the site many times since and tried to find some other reading that can account for the deep incision, flaking, pecking and polishing, nothing seems quite as reasonable to me as this new interpretation, meaning that there could truly be a vulva with hips and a nearly life-size sculpture of a bison - composed of natural relief, a partially chipped contour, pecked and polished musculature, and a deeply chiseled and smoothed rear incision - sprawled in a cave in the Massif de Fontainebleau. If I’m right and a bison does indeed lie within the feminized grotto, then the association fits other associations of large "armor-headed" herbivores – usually mammoths in the north and bison, reindeer, aurochs or mammoths in the south – with the life-giving portion of a woman’s body. One of my publications, Supernatural Pregnancies, which appeared in Arts & Cultures 20107, not only mentions the proposed Ségognole bison, but elaborates on the association in its development of a hypothesis concerning Paleolithic beliefs in "prey-mothers".


Finally, my extended analysis of the Ségognole bison and its ramifications, which is available as a PDF at the bottom of this page, was accepted by Dr. Jean Clottes for publication and presentation at the International Federation of Rock Art Organizations (IFRAO) Congress on Pleistocene art in the World, which was held in France from  September 6-11, 2010. After describing of the first Paleolithic bas-relief of an animal in the Ile-de-France, the article plunges into a series of startling proposals about:


  1. -the oldest equivalent of the rabbit-duck illusion, which played off similarities between the contours of bison and mammoths,


  1. -an example of precocious cubism in another cave, 


  1. -iconic Paleolithic images of "women", who actually have unrecognized fur, manes, hooves and hocks,


  1. -a spectral snake and baby hidden in one of the most famous of these images, and


  1. -the "prey-mother" hypothesis.


In the first of two planned articles about aspects of this paper, Andrew Howley of National Geographic reported on the paper’s revelation of one of the world’s oldest known optical illusions: a sculpture from Canecaude, which has eyes on either side of a crescent. The one above the curve turns it into a mammoth’s tusk while the eye below the crescent turns it into a bison’s horn.


Composite bison-mammoths. Top left: A composite being with signs of mammoth and bison heads (Breuil’s bisons 18, right, & 19, left) at each end of a common trunk. Font-de-Gaume. (After Daubisse, P., et al. 1994. La grotte de Font-de-Gaume. Périgueux: Pierre Fanlac Éditeur. p. 12). Top Right: Bison-mammoth spear-thrower with a “mammoth” eye above and “bison” eye below a crescent that serves both as tusk & horn. Grotte de Canecaude, Aude, Laboratoire de la Préhistoire, Carcassonne. (After Gély, B., & M. Azéma. 2005. Les Mammouths de la Grotte Chauvet, p 105, Fig 74). Bottom left & right: A single zoomorphic figurine that reads both as a bison (left) and mammoth (right). The author is participating in the description of the assemblage from the Upper Paleolithic site near Cambrai, which has only been reported in a cursory fashion until now, most notably in Archeologia (March 1992). Lecocq collection.




 



The proposed ventral line of the Ségognole 3 bison is defined by changes both in relief and color. The central zone of the above photograph shows these changes for the section under the “abdomen”.


1 Valois, Laurent 1996.  L’Abri Orné du Coquibus 3 dit Abri du Cavalier à Milly-la-Forêt (Essonne). Groupe d’Etudes, de Recherches et de Sauvegarde de l’Art Rupestre (GERSAR)


2 Nelh, Georges. 1984. Abri du cheval. L’art des cavernes. In: Atlas des grottes ornées paleolithiques françaises. Paris: Ministère de la Culture, Direction du Patrimoine, pp. 307-308.


3 Tarrete, Jacques. 1985. Informations Archéologiques, Circonscription d’Ile-de-France. Gallia Préhistoire, Tome 28, fasc. 2, pp 277-278.


4 Benard, Alain 2007. L’Abri Orné Paléolithique de la Segognole. Seine-et-Marne. Mémoire de Master Quaternaire et Préhistoire. Muséum National d’Histoire Naturelle, Département de Préhistoire.



5 Laming-Emperaire, Annette 1962. La Signification de l’art rupestre paléolithique. Picard,

Paris.


6 Leroi-Gourhan, André 1965. La Préhistoire de l’art occidental. Mazenod, Paris.


7 Caldwell, Duncan 2010. Supernatural Pregnancies: Common features and new ideas concerning Upper Paleolithic feminine imagery. Arts & Cultures, Barbier-Mueller Museum, Geneva. pp. 52-75






The forequarters of the 190 cm. long, proposed Ségognole 3 bison include the head with its beard,  a nuchal depression, back hump, swayed dorsal line, front leg represented by a ridge, and a ventral line announced by changes in both color and contour. The contour of the proposed back that is highlighted in red does not require any highlighting on-site because the rock seen above the contour in a photo is actually 2 to 3 meters farther away, a fact picked up in the cave by our stereoscopic vision. Furthermore, when the dorsal line was traced onto a clear plastic sheet laid directly over the rock from the perspective a person in front of the vulva, it was noted by an observer in the upper chamber, beyond the “back”, that the person marking the back’s ridge had placed it unknowingly directly at the tip of an incised line and adjacent to an incised “X” that are out-of-sight behind the “back”, suggesting that these abstract marks just outside the “bison” mark its contour or are otherwise related to it. Finally, a tight fan of lines is incised into the ceiling directly above the possible bison’s abdomen.







A live wisent or European bison in a similar position to the proposed sculpture.







Key words: Paleolithic art, Cave art, Fontainebleau








The vulvar zone in Ségognole 3 is intermittently moistened by water flowing through the sandstone wall from a basin on the cave floor in a second tunnel behind the engraved rock face. The dark rivulet formed by water dripping through the ceiling of this more elevated tunnel can be seen here flowing from the right into the hollow at center left, where the water sinks “mysteriously” into a  porous or fissured section of the floor, from which the water reappears on the opposite side of the partition on the left, through the vulvar incisions. This feature, which is reported here for the first time and reminds one of “miraculous” statues of our own period that seem to sweat or bleed, may link the vulva thematically to water despite the cave’s distance from the nearest stream or river.




© 2005 onwards Duncan Caldwell,  text & all images except the one of the live European bison



Please click on the following thumbnail photos, which I’ve used as icons, to see the web pages or PDFs described in the captions.


PDF: The Identification of the First Palaeolithic Animal Sculpture in the Ile-de-France: The Ségognole 3 Bison and its Ramifications. Accepted for presentation at the IFRAO Congress on Pleistocene art in the world / Congrès IFRAO sur l'art pléistocène dans le monde

6 - 11 September 2010, Ariège - Pyrénées, France


PDF: An historic sign, possible Mesolithic menhir, DStretch, and problems in dating rock art to the Sauveterrian in the Massif de Fontainebleau. Co-authored with my intern, Ulrika Botzojorns. Journal of Archaeological Science (2014, Vol. 42, February: 140-151)


PDF: Supernatural Pregnancies:  Common features and new ideas concerning Upper Paleolithic feminine imagery. 2010. Arts & Cultures, Barbier-Mueller Museum



World's Oldest Optical Illusion Found?” -
National Geographic article by Andrew Howley about Duncan Caldwell’s discovery of one of the world’s oldest known intentional optical illusions (Dec. 22, 2010)



 

 
 

Key words: Prehistoric venuses, Paleolithic sculpture, Paleolithic art, Paleolithic cave paintings, Paleolithic women, Paleolithic revolution, Paleolithic statuary, Paleolithic venus, Paleolithic engraving, Etiolles, women in art, art by women, supernatural pregnancy, Paleolithic man, archaeology, feminine art, Paleolithic venuses, Stone Age women, Women in prehistory, Paleolithic Venuses, Prehistoric women, Mother goddess, Upper Paleolithic figurines, Venus figurines, Palaeolithic art, Venus statuettes, Prehistoric art, Prehistoric porn?, Prehistoric matriarchy, Prehistoric matriarchies, Matriarchal myths, Prehistoric venus, Mother goddess, Women in prehistory, prehistoric cave art, Mother goddesses, prey-mother hypothesis, prey mother explanation for Paleolithic feminine imagery, Paleolithic bison, Altimira, Font-de-Gaume, World’s oldest optical illusion,