Altamira Cave Paintings: The Bison Ceiling of Cantabria

The Altamira cave paintings, in Cantabria in northern Spain, were the first Ice Age cave paintings ever recognised. Found in 1879 on land belonging to Marcelino Sanz de Sautuola, the cave’s great ceiling of red and black bison was at first dismissed as a modern forgery. Its acceptance in 1902 proved that people of the Old Stone Age had produced great art, and Altamira became the starting point for the study of prehistoric painting.

Background: Cantabria in the Ice Age

Altamira lies on a low hill about 2 kilometres from Santillana del Mar, near the Bay of Biscay coast. The cave is relatively short, about 270 metres long, with a series of chambers and passages. In prehistoric times the entrance was larger and opened into a sheltered area where people lived, cooked and made tools.

During the last glacial period the Cantabrian coast was cool but less harsh than much of Europe. Its valleys supported herds of bison, red deer, horses and ibex, and people living there hunted these animals and also collected shellfish. The region contains dozens of decorated caves, and Altamira is the best known of them. Others nearby include El Castillo, with its hand stencils and red disks, Las Monedas and Tito Bustillo in neighbouring Asturias. Together they make northern Spain, with south-west France, one of the two great centres of Ice Age cave art.

Excavations in the floor deposits show human occupation in the Solutrean period and especially in the early Magdalenian, the last major culture of the Upper Palaeolithic. Around 13,000 years ago a collapse of the cave mouth sealed the entrance, preserving the paintings inside.

Discovery: from a hunter’s dog to a child’s glance

According to the traditional account, around 1868 a local man named Modesto Cubillas found the entrance while trying to free his dog, which had become trapped among rocks. The find attracted little interest at the time.

Marcelino Sanz de Sautuola, a lawyer and landowner with an interest in natural history, visited the cave in the mid-1870s. After seeing prehistoric artefacts at the 1878 Paris Universal Exhibition, he returned to dig in the cave floor in 1879. He was accompanied by his daughter María, then about eight years old. According to the family story, María wandered into a side chamber, looked up at the low ceiling and saw painted animals that her father, bent over his digging, had not noticed.

Sautuola concluded that the paintings were as old as the stone tools and bones he was finding below them. In 1880 he published a short booklet, Breves apuntes sobre algunos objetos prehistóricos de la provincia de Santander (“Brief notes on some prehistoric objects of the province of Santander”), illustrated with drawings of the ceiling.

The forgery accusation

Sautuola’s claim met strong resistance. The geologist Juan Vilanova y Piera of Madrid supported him and presented the paintings to international meetings. But at the International Congress of Prehistoric Anthropology and Archaeology held in Lisbon in 1880, the leading specialists, most of them French, did not accept them.

There were several reasons. No Palaeolithic paintings had been found before, although small carved objects were known. The colours looked strikingly fresh, the drawing was confident and the bison were shown with a skill that many experts believed impossible for “primitive” hunters. Some suspected that Sautuola had arranged for a modern artist to paint them. The French prehistorian Émile Cartailhac was among the most influential sceptics.

The accusation weighed heavily on Sautuola, who died in 1888 without seeing his discovery vindicated. Vilanova died in 1893.

Vindication: “Mea culpa d’un sceptique”

Opinion changed as new discoveries were made in France. Engravings and paintings were found in caves such as La Mouthe (from 1895) and Les Combarelles and Font-de-Gaume (1901), some of them partly covered by ancient calcite deposits that could not have been faked.

In 1902 Cartailhac published an article in the journal L’Anthropologie titled “La grotte d’Altamira, Espagne. Mea culpa d’un sceptique” (“The cave of Altamira, Spain: a sceptic’s mea culpa”), publicly admitting his error. That year he visited Altamira with the young priest and prehistorian Henri Breuil, who copied the paintings. Their joint monograph on the cave appeared in 1906. From then on, Altamira was accepted as genuine Ice Age art, and Sautuola’s reputation was restored, though only after his death.

The polychrome ceiling

The heart of Altamira is the Polychrome Ceiling, a low rock ceiling roughly 18 metres long and 9 metres wide. Over it are spread around two dozen large animals, most of them bison, along with horses, a large female red deer more than 2 metres long and a possible wild boar. Counts vary slightly depending on how incomplete figures are treated.

The bison are shown standing, lying, curled up or turning their heads. Many are painted over natural bulges in the rock, so that the bumps of the ceiling become the animals’ shoulders and flanks. This gives a strong sense of volume when the ceiling is seen by moving light.

Materials and technique

The artists drew outlines in black, using charcoal and manganese-based pigments, and filled the bodies with red and yellow ochres, iron-rich earth pigments. They scraped and washed parts of the colour to create lighter areas and details. This combination of several colours is why the ceiling is called “polychrome”, meaning many-coloured.

Elsewhere in the cave are engraved and painted deer, horses, goats and bison, hand stencils, and many abstract signs. A deep, narrow gallery at the back, known as the Horse’s Tail, contains signs and simple faces, sometimes called masks, formed partly from natural rock shapes.

Dating Altamira

Charcoal from the black outlines of several bison has given radiocarbon dates that, once calibrated, place the polychrome ceiling roughly 18,500 to 14,000 years ago, in the Magdalenian. Stylistic comparisons and finds from the floor deposits, including engraved shoulder blades, broadly support this.

A study published in 2012 used uranium-series dating on thin calcite crusts that had formed over some of the paintings in northern Spanish caves. At Altamira, a red claviform (club-shaped) sign on the ceiling gave a minimum age of about 36,000 years. This suggests that the cave was decorated over a span of roughly 20,000 years, long before the famous bison were painted.

Uranium-series results of this kind give only a minimum age, because the calcite formed after the paint was applied; the painting itself could be older. Some researchers have questioned aspects of the method, and dating cave art remains an active field. Even so, the broad picture is clear: Altamira was not decorated in a single campaign but visited and painted by many generations.

Tourism, damage and the Neocueva

Altamira became a major tourist attraction in the 20th century. Visitor numbers peaked in the early 1970s, when well over 100,000 people a year entered the cave. Their breath, body heat and lighting changed the cave’s humidity and carbon dioxide levels and threatened the paintings.

The cave was closed in 1977, reopened in 1982 with strict limits and closed again in 2002 after green colonies of microorganisms were detected on walls. Since 2014 an experimental scheme has allowed five visitors chosen by lottery to enter once a week for a short guided visit, a policy that has been debated by scientists.

To give the public access, the National Museum and Research Centre of Altamira opened in 2001 near the cave. Its centrepiece is the Neocueva (“new cave”), a full-scale replica of the original cave as it may have looked in the Palaeolithic, including a reproduction of the Polychrome Ceiling.

In 1985 UNESCO inscribed Altamira on the World Heritage List. In 2008 the listing was extended to include 17 other decorated caves in Cantabria, Asturias and the Basque Country, under the name “Cave of Altamira and Paleolithic Cave Art of Northern Spain”.

Myths and facts

“Picasso said that after Altamira, all is decadence.” This line is repeated in countless books and guides, but no reliable original source has been found. It may reflect what Picasso thought, but it cannot be treated as a confirmed quotation.

“A dog discovered the paintings.” The dog story concerns the discovery of the cave entrance around 1868. The paintings themselves were noticed in 1879, traditionally by María Sanz de Sautuola.

“Altamira is the oldest cave art.” It is not. Some of its signs are very old, but Chauvet in France and caves in Indonesia, described in Sulawesi Cave Art, hold older figurative images.

Timeline

• c. 36,000 years ago or earlier: A red club-shaped sign is painted on the ceiling (minimum uranium-series age).
• c. 18,500–14,000 years ago: The polychrome bison ceiling is painted during the Magdalenian.
• c. 13,000 years ago: A collapse seals the cave entrance.
• c. 1868: Modesto Cubillas finds the cave entrance.
• 1879: María Sanz de Sautuola notices the painted ceiling while her father excavates.
• 1880: Sautuola publishes his booklet; specialists at the Lisbon congress reject the paintings.
• 1902: Émile Cartailhac publishes his “Mea culpa d’un sceptique” and visits with Henri Breuil.
• 1985: UNESCO adds Altamira to the World Heritage List.
• 2001: The Neocueva replica opens; the original cave closes again in 2002.

Why it matters

Altamira forced scholars to accept that Ice Age people were capable of complex, beautiful art, overturning assumptions about “primitive” humans. The bitter controversy around Sautuola also became a lesson in how scientific consensus can be wrong. Today, alongside Lascaux and Chauvet, Altamira remains one of the defining images of prehistoric creativity.