Caves of Gargas

The Caves of Gargas hold one of the most haunting sights in Ice Age art: walls crowded with the outlines of human hands. More than two hundred of them have been counted, stencilled in red ochre or black manganese by blowing pigment around a palm pressed flat against the rock. They belong to men and women and to children, even infants, and in nearly half of them the fingers stop short, as though missing their outer joints, while the thumb is always whole. Few painted caves anywhere hold so many.

What those shortened fingers mean has been argued over for more than a century. Early researchers wondered about ritual amputation, frostbite or disease; many prehistorians now think the painters simply bent some fingers down while the paint was sprayed, perhaps as a kind of sign language or code, though the purpose remains unknown. A splinter of bone wedged into a crack beside one of the hand panels has been radiocarbon dated to about 27,000 years ago, placing the cave's use in the Gravettian period, close in age to the oldest hands at Cosquer on the Mediterranean coast. Deeper in, engraved lines pick out horses, bison, aurochs, ibex and mammoth, and soft wall surfaces carry finger tracings left by people moving through the dark.

Gargas sits on a limestone slope on the edge of the Pyrenees, in the commune of Aventignan in Hautes-Pyrénées, and people knew of its galleries long before anyone understood the paintings. Félix Régnault, who dug here in the 1880s, announced the hands in 1906, and Émile Cartailhac and Henri Breuil also studied the cave. It was protected as a French historic monument in 1910. Six kilometres to the south-east, the hilltop village of Saint-Bertrand-de-Comminges, once a Roman town, is crowned by its great cathedral of Sainte-Marie.

Getting there

The cave lies in the Neste valley near the small town of Montréjeau, whose station is on the Toulouse–Tarbes line; Tarbes, the nearest city, is about 43 km to the west. The nearest airport is Tarbes–Lourdes–Pyrénées (LDE), about 46 km away; Toulouse–Blagnac is the larger gateway further east.