Odd this day
Three teenage boys in a home-made raft discover caves containing some remarkable palaeolithic art — including paintings of bison, horses, and big cats, and some of the earliest cock pictures ever created.
Max, Jacques, and Louis Begouën may not have been hindered by the fact that their father, Comte Henri Bégouën, was an established archaeologist, but three teenage boys navigating an underground river on a craft they’d built themselves and finding 15,000-year-old intact art is nonetheless quite an achievement.
Bégouën and his sons had discovered one cave system in the French Pyrenees during the Easter holidays of 1912, but the landowner, Mr Moulis de Méritens, on learning that his cave was a valuable find, refused anyone permission to see it, in case that devalued it, apparently thinking he might make some cash. That summer, then, they looked elsewhere in the same region and — exploring the underground reaches of the river in the raft they’d built themselves — discovered the cave Tuc d’Audoubert. By October, they had found cave walls engraved and painted with images of 103 animals, including horses, reindeer, and big cats — but especially bison.
In the deepest ‘room’ of the cave, now known as ‘the Room of the Bisons’, they found two detailed and realistic bison sculpted in clay. Because only researchers are allowed in, these are very well preserved.
Two years later (precisely — on the second anniversary of their first discovery), a farmer showed them a hole in the ground, blocked with stones to stop sheep falling in. They spent two days clearing the stones before entering a cave now named after the boys: la grotte des Trois-Frères. There, on 21 July, they found a space now dubbed the Sanctuary, and a figure variously known as the sorcerer or shaman, and described by Bégouën himself as “this bizarre figure”. On the wall itself, it looks like this:
Professor of prehistoric ethnology and Catholic priest Henri Breuil, who brought the caves and paintings to the world’s attention, drew it looking something like this:
In his 1920 paper, Un dessin relevé dans la caverne des Trois-frères, Bégouën wrote:
Strongly bent forward, his arms elevated, he seems to be dancing. He is masked. He has a long beard … the ears of a wolf or a fox, and the antlers of a stag on his head
(I am quoting here from the 1 May 2020 edition of a splendidly odd zine, Hellebore, which first alerted me to this historical oddity, specifically a piece called The Sorcerer in the Cave by Anna Milon.)
He added:
The sexual organs shown thrust backwards, behind the buttocks, are strongly emphasised
(which I guess is 1920s-speak for “I may as well acknowledge the cock and balls, because you can’t miss them”).
In later years, the presence of the horns was questioned, but no one has ever disputed the genitals. Indeed, there are still Bégouëns exploring the caves, two of whom — Éric and Marie-Brune — produced a paper in 2013 (New discoveries in the Sanctuary of Les Trois-Frères cave (Ariège)) which pointed out that their forebears had failed to mention
a human phallus in the vicinity of a naturally shaped vulva.
They suggest that
To suspect [our ancestors] of prudery or even censorship does not seem credible
– which is, perhaps, the obvious defence of Abbé Henri Breuil. To a casual observer, though, one can’t help wondering if it was not religion which prevented him seeing a giant cock and balls on the wall of a cave, so much as innocence (or lack of imagination). When one sees the phallus, for example, one… may not immediately know it’s there:
The paper, however (in French, Découverte d’un grand phallus gravé magdalénien dans la grotte des Trois-Frères) helpfully provides a close-up of what the translated version describes as a “natural concavity evoking a feminine sex”:
…which is, admittedly, a little more convincing. (Incidentally, fact fans, ‘Magdalénien’ refers to the later cultures of the Upper Paleolithic and Mesolithic in western Europe.)
They also provide a marked-up version of the phallus, showing the lines our forefathers scratched into the rock, which do look at least something like the kind of thing schoolboys have been scrawling on books, walls, and other surfaces for as long as there have been schoolboys:
…and you can also see it in context (i.e. surrounded by bison, mammoth and other pictures):
Once you have it pointed out to you, and in context, it does seem convincing, and it is almost comforting (certainly not surprising) to find that 15,000 years ago, there were people who saw a hole in a cave wall and thought to themselves, “That looks a bit like a fanny. I know; I’ll draw a cock.” The parallels between archaeology, anthropology, ethnology, geology and Viz Comic may not be obvious, but are testament to the extent of human ingenuity, and contributors to the gaiety of nations.
Viz, for example, brought us Buster Gonad, the boy with unfeasibly large testicles, and New discoveries in the Sanctuary of Les Trois-Frères cave (Ariège) is careful to point out that the etched penis in question is bigger than any other in France. A similar specimen at Bédheilhac is a mere 28 cm, and one at Fronsac comes in at 38 cm. this one stands proud at 58cm long.
Not that size is important, you understand.
(Some of the above images were nicked from this excellent resource, if you want to find out more.)
