The aurochs, the mammoth, and the steppe bison have been extinct for a long time, but their painted images still look surprisingly fresh on the walls and ceilings of Altamira. At least, that’s what Diego Garate Maidagan told me. He’s one of the very few people allowed into that famous cave in northern Spain.
I met Garate last summer in a small Basque village called Gautegiz Arteaga. He’s a professor of prehistory and Paleolithic art at the University of Cantabria. He told me he had been inside Altamira just the week before, continuing his lifelong research into the preparation, tools, and methods used by early Homo sapiens painters.
About 34,000 years ago, our distant ancestors began creating frescoes with light and shadow effects in those underground chambers. The cave was used for many thousands of years, until a rockfall sealed the entrance. Almost an entire geological epoch passed before a curious hunting dog clawed its way through the opening in 1868, leading a series of visitors into the first prehistoric gallery ever seen by modern eyes.
The art in Altamira seemed far too advanced for the cave-dwelling simpletons that Paleolithic people were assumed to be. Self-appointed experts from France initially declared the whole thing a hoax. (Those critics looked pretty foolish when similar caves were later found in their own country.) Pablo Picasso is said to have visited, or at least seen some photos. The quote attributed to him may not be real, but it’s still a memorable judgment: “After Altamira, all is decadence.”
The site opened to the public in 1917, was partly closed in the 1970s, and then shut for good in 2002. A century of admiring visitors had revealed the damaging effects of moisture and carbon monoxide from too many people’s breath. A replica cave, with replica artwork, was built nearby. Today, only Garate and a few other scholars can enter the original sanctuary.
Garate’s specialty involves closely studying the etching or “pecking” technique. The artists used flint blades to outline figures on the rock before applying ochre and charcoal. Altamira is rare and precious, he told me, because those reds and blacks are still so solid and vivid. The colors were preserved by the near-quarantine conditions created by that ancient landslide.
A painting of a bison, believed to be tens of thousands of years old, in Altamira cave. Photograph: Pedro A Saura/AP
The latest thinking suggests that our ancestors painted across western Europe, and what we now call “cave art” is only what survived on the deepest, darkest surfaces they touched.
Luck and geology left us a few great sanctuaries like Altamira, and many others where the pigments have long since disappeared from the walls—eaten by bacteria, covered by sheets of calcite, or worn away by air and water. In most cases, all that remains are faint chisel marks tracing the legs, horns, and tusks of animals that were once as common as cattle. Like the “shadow pictures” sometimes found by X-rays beneath the paint of Titian or Caravaggio, these early images are very hard to see without expert help.
In the far north of the Basque Country, the recent search for such traces has sparked “a little revolution,” according to Garate. He should know, since he’s the main instigator. He’s also a local, living with his wife and kids in the same small estuary town, Plentzia, where he grew up.
The day we met, Garate looked ready for adventure: stubbled face, short hair, a wiry, handsome guy in great shape for early middle age, wearing tactical trousers with padded knees. He picked me up in a messy hatchback that doubled as a locker for his caving gear, and we drove over the kind of mountain road that can quickly make a note-taking passenger carsick.
Garate and his colleagues in Santander plan…They launched a campaign to test a working theory: that the caves of northern Spain and southwestern France were once richly decorated with pictograms and petroglyphs, now barely visible to the untrained eye.
“Back then, there were only three of us in my department,” said Garate. “And we would each need three lifetimes to explore all those caves.” So they consulted, enlisted, and effectively deputized a task force from the Union of Basque Speleologists. The academics taught the spelunkers to angle their headlamps a certain way and adjust their gaze just so. And, like messages appearing in steam on a bathroom mirror, ghostly portraits of prehistoric animals began to reveal themselves all across the Basque Country. Garate himself has found more than his share, including two bison and a horse lingering in faded ochre stains at Mount Lumentxa.
We drove around that mountain and down into the village of Lekeitio, an old fishing port between the Bay of Biscay and the Lea River. Garate wanted to show me a particular cave, where construction of a residential building had opened a crack in the mountain rock. Inside was a cavity that, as far as anyone could tell, no human had ever entered. Finding no footprints, no bones, no signs of entry, and certainly no artwork, Garate and his team labeled it a “clean” cave and used it as a testing ground for field experiments. Named Isuntza after the nearest beach, it was now a laboratory where multidisciplinary researchers could test their theories under optimal conditions.
From the trunk of the car, Garate handed me a mining helmet with a headlamp and took out a heavy key to open a low metal gate at the base of the cliff. We bent into a limestone crawl space and followed it for about 20 feet until we could stand upright in a wider, taller chamber. There, about half a dozen PhD students stood at workstations, their lights and cameras making the cave look like a movie set. Glowing readouts on laptop screens and phone apps tracked moisture and temperature levels in real time, mapped the cave’s contours for 3D and virtual reality models, and recorded changes in the color metrics of pigments applied to the surfaces. Inside alcoves, behind pillars, and across bedding planes, they had painted rough approximations of the abstract geometric shapes and archetypal figures seen at cave art sites across Europe, Africa, and Australia.
The general idea, Garate told me, was to reverse-engineer the processes of prehistoric image-making: to unpack the practical, mechanical decisions of the artists, and thus better understand their skills, knowledge, and means of communication. One project measured the “luminous intensity” and “radius of action” achieved by burning different woods and fats to light the cave. Their last live test with flaming torches had produced so much smoke that the whole team had to get out quickly.
My beam now pointed to a surface where handprints had been made using the stencil technique our ancestors left at Altamira and elsewhere. Garate had helped with this experiment, using bird bones as blowpipes to spray bursts of ochre around his palm and fingers, or filling his mouth with the stuff to spit it out.
“How did it taste?” I asked him.
“Terrible. Disgusting,” he said. “And when you work with ochre, it stays on your skin and clothes for days.”
Another handprint belonged to Olga Spaey, a Belgian PhD candidate whose studies had brought her here from Bordeaux Montaigne University. When I spoke to Spaey later, I marveled that such a poignant little souvenir of her existence might still be on that wall in 37,000 years—roughly how long ago a group of children, adolescents, and adults pressed their palms against a low ceiling in a nearby cave called El Castillo. “Or it might be gone in a fe”Weeks,” she said. (Water dripping down the rock had already washed away some of the samples in the test cave.)
In these cave systems, it seems people lived in one area—near the surface—while creating and displaying specific artwork in another, more remote chamber that was still spacious and accessible enough for group gatherings. Solo artists also ventured deeper underground to leave single handprints in the most remote and difficult parts of the cave.
“I do believe that rock art was kind of religious,” Spaey told me. This is a common view among researchers in this field. But I found the word “religious” unsatisfying in some way—it felt like an answer that took away from the mystery. In any case, this test cave was mainly designed to figure out how the art was made. The question of why was beyond the scope of the study.
The technology available to researchers could now model how the cave changed over thousands of years. In Spaey’s view, each new projection just produced more data to sort through, consider, and usually discard, without necessarily shedding much light on any particular theory. “We keep gathering more information, and I sometimes think we’re losing sight of what we’re looking for. The search for meaning, you could say.”
“I love caves,” she continued. “It’s my favorite thing, being inside them. They take you out of life, out of time, into this complete darkness. They are dangerous. You could die. But that’s a very human feeling—to be cold, to be scared, to be listening for noises. It’s quite primal. So in that strange environment, maybe we go back to basic things we share with earlier humans.”
I liked the sound of that too, but I was trying to stay cool, like Garate, who now led me back out of the Isuntza cave and drove me up the road to another one called Atxurra—a place where he had personally discovered engravings that he described as being in “the Champions League of rock art.”
Ranking at or near the top of that league is surely Lascaux, the most famous painted cave of all. I had been there with my family a few years earlier—or more precisely, to the replica version in a visitor center just outside the French village of Montignac.
My interest in cave art had been growing as I got older and more gloomy. The earliest expressions of human civilization seemed to become more relevant and poignant the closer we came to the end of it. I had a general dread of the future, mixed with the sentimental worries of a middle-aged man. Online chatter told me that men of this age spend a lot of their day thinking about the Roman Empire, but that period was too late for my taste. I looked to deep time and underground spaces for comfort. My daughter, then just under five, was both my biggest worry and my best remedy. She cheered me up with her own take on human evolution, which boiled down our entire chain of species inheritance into a single human-like figure she called “my monkey grandma.” Her monkey grandma, of course, had painted the cave of Lascaux.
My own way of thinking about Paleolithic humans was heavily influenced by The Dawn of Everything by anthropologist David Graeber and archaeologist David Wengrow—a Christmas gift I read entirely before New Year’s Eve. Another key text for me was The Humanoid Stain, a 2019 essay by the late author and activist Barbara Ehrenreich. Thinking about the oldest human art, she noted that animals were often shown with reverent detail, while human forms barely appeared on cave walls, and when they did, they looked like clumsy stick figures: cartoons confused by their own erections. Considering their place in the food chain, the painters didn’t seem to take their own species very seriously. “They were meat,” wrote Ehrenreich, “and they also seemed to know that they knew they were meat—meat that could think. And that, if you think about it long enough, is almost fu—”Ehrenreich concluded that we no longer see ourselves that way. We’ve lost the ability to laugh at ourselves. “And I strongly suspect that we will not survive the mass extinction we have brought upon ourselves, unless we too finally get the joke.” When I read that, it felt true to me too. I had pictured the ancient past as a moon shining down on the doomed planet of the present.
I could still imagine our ancestors’ existence as a terrifying show of danger and confusion. But I also envied them. Reading book after book about their “lifeworld,” to use Edmund Husserl’s lovely term, I longed for the greenness and abundance of their Earth as they slowly spread across it on foot, moving just a few miles each generation. They had everything ahead of them, those tunic-wearing bastards.
They were also crazy about hallucinogens, or so claimed South African archaeologist David Lewis-Williams in The Mind in the Cave. This famously unusual analysis drew on the rituals of the San people in southern Africa and lab experiments with psychoactive drugs. Consider this: the human brain on drugs, in total darkness, or with eyes closed, creates visual effects called entoptic phenomena. These produce shapes and patterns—dots, lines, zigzags, coronas—that also show up as recurring motifs in tribal art, from modern South Africa to the Upper Palaeolithic caves of western Europe. Lewis-Williams argued that shamanic beliefs could interpret these brain-based phenomena as signs or gateways, leading a culture deep underground to paint or carve those floating forms on the walls of their spirit world.
Down in that darkness, they would also project images of the animals they hunted, both in waking life and in dreams. And while doing so, they would take substances and perform ritual dances to enter trance states and blur the edges of reality. “Holy shit,” you might think, as I did—but many archaeologists really hate this idea. I heard it come up on Melvyn Bragg’s BBC Radio 4 show In Our Time, and a guest professor from Durham University was practically laughing with scorn.
Soon after that, in October 2024, I was in the Basque Country on a reporting assignment when I happened to meet the eminent Israeli prehistorian Ran Barkai. He was fully convinced by Lewis-Williams and a bit annoyed by that opposing strain of British scholarship. “Many of them seem to think it’s disrespectful to suggest that primitive Homo sapiens were getting stoned or entering altered states of consciousness,” Barkai told me. “It’s almost like they want Homo sapiens to be a serious guy, wearing a suit and doing everything properly. They see a direct connection between rock art and the British Museum, or the Louvre.”
Barkai was the one who first told me about the Atxurra cave. We started talking at the Urdaibai Bird Center, a bird museum and monitoring station on a rewilded salt marsh between the Oka River and the Bay of Biscay. I was there to write about the place as a gentle and sustainable model for nature tourism, now threatened by a more invasive kind.
Late in the season, only a few of us were staying in the simple lodgings the center provides for birdwatchers and ornithologists. But Professor Barkai was no more a birdwatcher than I was. He had come to the region for the cave art. And after spending a full day spelunking to Palaeolithic engravings deep inside the Atxurra network, he now sat overtired and overstimulated on a low couch in the visitor lounge. We both faced a window wall the size of a cinema screen.
It was a field trip, he said.For his work in the archaeology department at Tel Aviv University, I admitted my own curiosity as a non-expert and mentioned that I had recently finished The Mind in the Cave. When I asked what he thought of it, Barkai seemed genuinely surprised. He might have done a double take. Being casually questioned by a stranger in such a remote place about a fairly niche topic within his own field… but, like Carl Jung, he didn’t really believe in coincidences either. He had just co-written a book that linked Jungian psychology to cave art.
In short: Jung built his idea of the collective unconscious on a dream where he went down the stairs of a large house. Each level represented a deeper, older layer of human history, from the 20th century down to a basement floor scattered with the oldest Homo sapiens skulls. So, standing before the images our ancestors made in that basement is like recognizing or remembering archetypes that once mattered to us.
“I believe we see what they saw in caves,” Barkai said. “Our subconscious is inherited from theirs, and we share the same feelings they had when entering those spaces.” After a couple of glasses of Basque white wine, txakoli, I asked if he thought we had let them down—the ones who came before us. (An earlier book of his was called They Were Here Before Us.) I meant, they gave us fire, and we went on to burn the planet with it. Maybe he also felt that our monkey ancestors would be deeply disappointed in how we turned out?
“I don’t think the first Homo sapiens would have any expectations of us, or let’s say, anticipations,” Barkai said. “But I do believe we’ve made more mistakes than they did. We lost the connection they had to this world. They led the way quite nicely and successfully, and we got… distracted. We took another path, which is now leading us to a dead end, maybe.” He believed early Homo sapiens had it better than we do. “It was a picnic for them,” he said.
Barkai didn’t like to complain about his own situation, “but things are almost impossible in Israel now,” he told me, answering a question I hadn’t asked. Lately, he had been making things hard for himself by protesting against his own government every weekend. “I feel very happy to be here at this moment,” he said. The marshes and mountains outside the window were bright blue and deep green. We watched ospreys, spoonbills, herons with pterodactyl-like flight patterns, and many other birds we couldn’t name, all gliding down over the tidal flats.
It was Barkai who put me in touch with Garate, who then filed a formal application on my behalf, asking the Basque government to let me into the Atxurra cave. After a few months, permission came through.
There’s no money in these caves, Garate told me on the short drive from Isuntza, so there’s no real investment in research or upkeep. When we entered through the iron gate now installed at Atxurra, the handle broke off as soon as he locked it behind us. “I hope we can get out again,” he said, and I laughed because he laughed.
Since its discovery in the 1880s, amateur explorers, teenage lovers, and football fans have scrawled names and dates all along the front passages of the cave: we passed tags from 1884, 1902, 1943, 1965. Garate pointed out claw marks left on the walls by cave bears that went extinct about 26,000 years ago.
Over the past 150 years, professional digs had turned up reindeer bones, tool fragments, and charcoal residue that marked an early human living space not far inside the cave, and probably repeated use in different time periods. But no art was found in Atxurra until Garate and his colleague Iñaki Intxaurbe came to explore its deepest parts in 2015.
Later, they would reconstruct how Stone Age pioneers made their way all the way back there with lighting and painting supplies. They calculated that the inward journeyIt would have taken about 40 minutes for a small team using wooden torches while moving, and fat-burning lanterns once they reached the work site. Our own two-person expedition moved a bit faster, since we had good boots, helmet lamps, and a route that Garate knew by heart.
[View image in fullscreen: Diego Garate Maidagan in Armintxe test cave in Lekeitio, Spain. Photograph: Diego Garate]
After what felt like half an hour of constant movement, I checked my watch and saw it had only been about nine minutes. Garate said he never got used to how time gets distorted while caving. A busy day in the dark could feel like a full work week; a night spent camping inside a mountain might pass like a short nap.
Moving through that space felt like wandering through a huge, empty city during a massive blackout. No starlight to help, no candles in windows—just two thin beams from our headlamps sweeping over streets and structures that were otherwise invisible. At some points, we had to crawl on our stomachs, squeezing our heads and backsides under low-hanging rock, wriggling through wet clay and guano. Other sections required climbing up into the dark, with Garate guiding me to safe hand and foot holds. We went far beyond the easily reachable galleries into trickier areas known only to serious cavers, though for ten years the whole network had been closed to everyone except approved researchers.
When we reached the back of the cave, I could feel the wind and hear the dripping water that had either washed away the pigments or covered them in sediment. My guide gently held my head to get the right angle for my helmet lamp to shine on what he wanted to show me. For a long time, I couldn’t make out what Garate was pointing at, until my eyes and brain adjusted and the animals began to take shape under his finger.
He traced their outlines from point to point, like connecting stars in a constellation. “So here we have a forest bison,” he said. “This is the head, the chin, the horns over here. The back leg, and the tail.” There was still a hint of soot on that one—the only figure here that had kept a little of its charcoal coloring. The others had worn down to their original engraved lines, which Garate tried to bring to life with small gestures and sound effects, making a “chk-chk-chk” noise to show the cuts that formed a horse’s mane.
Below, he showed me where he had found a flint blade that was probably used to carve the ibex faintly visible above. In one spot, the artists had used three existing scratches from a bear claw, turning the grooves into what might have been a reindeer antler.
Another bison looked directly at us, its face shaped by lucky dents and bumps in the rock. “They love to do that,” said Garate, using the present tense as if it were still happening. “They find these hollows and play with the shapes.” We moved on to a spot he had named the Ledge of the Horses, where three horses were etched in fairly clear white lines, above three corresponding fireplaces, on a raised platform that curved overhead like a breaking wave of limestone. To an audience standing in the gallery below, he said, the flames would make the horses seem to run. “So it’s like a theater, like a performance.”
For the first time, he shifted from talking about technique to considering purpose, while being careful not to sound too certain. “We know it was important, because they invested so much time, effort, risk, and resources to bring people here and tell them something. But what they were saying, the meaning of the message… why three horses on this wall? Why two lions somewhere else? We don’t know, and we will never know.”
We took off our boots and put on small rubber slippers to climb onto the ledge without damaging the surface. Once up there, we sat cross-legged beside the scorched pits where the artists had built their fires. Garate and Intxaurbe had beenThey were the first to see their work in at least 500 generations. I asked if they had cried at the sight, like the spelunkers who discovered Chauvet in southeast France in 1994—probably the best-preserved of all decorated caves. “Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah,” said Garate. “We were really touched.” He sounded sincere enough, but didn’t seem like the type to ever fully lose his scientific composure.
A handful of specialists are allowed inside Chauvet for a few weeks each spring, and Garate had been chosen for that study group every March for the past eight years. Oh, to see for yourself “The Venus” and “The Sorcerer,” as they’re now known—a ghostly pubic triangle and an enigmatic horned man-bison hybrid, drawn in charcoal down a vertical cone of limestone.
I wanted my share of vicarious wonder from Garate—a spaceman who made regular trips to a forbidden planet—and he gave me a taste. “In other caves, like this one, you can feel how much time has passed. But when you enter Chauvet, you’d think it was all done last night. Like the artists only just left, because you came in and disturbed them.”
View image in fullscreen: Garate uses a laser pointer to reveal paintings of horses in the Atxurra cave in the Basque village of Berriatua. Photograph: AFP/Getty Images
I felt that distance in Atxurra, the light years separating me from whoever first sat in this spot with a stone chisel and a pot of pigment. A much younger site than Chauvet, this cave was so weathered it looked much older. And the art itself was very different here, Garate told me. The earlier painters were “crazier, and more expressionist,” as he put it.
He didn’t really think of the people who made these works as “artists” in our modern sense, but more like skilled craftsmen working from a template he’d seen repeated in other caves from roughly the same period. He recognized their style so easily because it was fairly uniform in its naturalism. Garate compared it to Soviet propaganda posters and the rigid forms of Egyptian hieroglyphics. In the light from my helmet lamp, he struck the stiff-armed, right-angled pose of a Pharaoh as drawn on a mummy’s tomb. “It’s like, ‘This is the way you have to do it,'” he said. This formed the basis of a guiding theory he’d developed over his career: that the images he’d spent so long studying were “governed by codes and systems of representation.”
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He moved as far as he would let himself into the realm of informed speculation about this art. “This activity required complex logistical preparation in terms of resources. Certain people had to specialize in these tasks, setting aside more basic survival tasks like hunting and fishing. Now, this implies the creation of surpluses in some kind of hierarchy. So, what we call ‘art’ here, beyond the mystery of its meaning, might help us understand the organization of that past society. And possibly, the very origins of inequality in humanity.”
Whatever picture of Paleolithic culture Garate had been building in his own work, it didn’t seem much like an anarchic picnic. And if things have gone wrong for our species, he was inclined to think it started earlier than others would argue—long before the shift to agriculture. He preferred to look at what was right in front of him, he said. But whenever he “imagined” prehistory, he thought of a very big book “of which we only have a few scattered pages.”
A version of this piece first appeared in the Dublin Review. Listen to our podcasts here and sign up to the long read weekly email here.
Frequently Asked Questions
Here is a list of FAQs about They take you out of life out of time a journey into Spains incredible cave paintings
BeginnerLevel Questions
1 What does the phrase They take you out of life out of time mean
It describes the feeling you get when you see the ancient cave paintings in Spain They are so powerful and mysterious that you forget your modern worries and feel connected to a world thousands of years ago
2 Where are Spains most famous cave paintings
The most famous ones are in the Cave of Altamira in northern Spain There are also incredible sites in the Ca Valley and caves in the region of Cantabria and Andalusia
3 How old are these paintings
They are incredibly old Some like those in Altamira are from around 14000 to 20000 years ago
4 What do the paintings show
Mostly animals bison deer horses wild boar and mammoths You also see handprints abstract symbols and sometimes human figures
5 Can I visit the actual caves
It depends The original Cave of Altamira is closed to the public to protect it However there is a perfect replica nearby that you can visit Many other caves are open with strict limits on visitor numbers
IntermediateLevel Questions
6 Why are the paintings so special
They are not just simple drawings The artists used the natural bumps and curves of the cave walls to give the animals a 3D almost living effect The colors are still vibrant after tens of thousands of years
7 How did they make the paint
They used natural pigments ochre charcoal and manganese They mixed these with binders like animal fat blood or plant resin They applied it with fingers brushes made of fur or by blowing pigment through hollow bones
8 Why did they paint inside deep dark caves
Thats a big mystery Popular theories include
