Pech Merle: The Spotted Horses and Hand Stencils of Quercy

Pech Merle is a limestone cave near Cabrerets in the Lot department of south-west France, famous for a panel of two spotted horses surrounded by hand stencils. Painted roughly 29,000 to 25,000 years ago, during the Gravettian period of the last Ice Age, the horses are among the best-known images of Palaeolithic art. Found by teenagers in 1922, Pech Merle is also one of the few decorated caves in France where visitors can still see the original paintings.

Background: Quercy in the Ice Age

The cave lies in Quercy, a region of dry limestone plateaux (causses) cut by river gorges, including the valleys of the Lot and its tributary the Célé. Over millions of years, water dissolving the limestone created a network of caves and underground galleries. Many of them were visited by people during the Upper Palaeolithic, the later Old Stone Age, between about 45,000 and 12,000 years ago.

During this period much of Europe was colder than today. The landscape of south-west France was largely open grassland and scattered woodland, home to horses, bison, aurochs (wild cattle), reindeer, ibex and woolly mammoths. People lived by hunting and gathering, and in some regions they decorated deep caves with paintings and engravings.

Pech Merle belongs to this tradition, alongside sites such as the Chauvet cave paintings in the Ardèche and the later Lascaux cave paintings in the Dordogne. Its main decoration is generally attributed to the Gravettian culture, which flourished across Europe from roughly 33,000 to 24,000 years ago.

Discovery in 1922

The decorated galleries were found in 1922 by local teenagers. André David, then about 16, together with his sister Marthe and their friend Henri Dutertre, squeezed through narrow passages that had been partly explored before. They came upon chambers filled with paintings and natural formations.

The young explorers had been encouraged by Abbé Amédée Lemozi, the parish priest of Cabrerets and an enthusiastic prehistorian. Lemozi studied the paintings, excavated parts of the cave and published the first account of the site. He presented Pech Merle as a kind of prehistoric sanctuary, an interpretation typical of the period.

The cave was opened to the public in 1926. A new access was made for visitors, and the original prehistoric entrance, long blocked by collapse, was located later. Lemozi’s work also led to a museum of prehistory on the site, which now bears his name.

The spotted horses panel

The most famous image at Pech Merle is the panel of the spotted horses (in French, “les chevaux ponctués”). Two horses, painted in black outline, stand back to back with their hindquarters overlapping. Their bodies, and the space around them, are covered with large black dots. The panel is roughly 3.5 to 4 metres long.

Using the shape of the rock

The right-hand horse is a clear example of how Palaeolithic artists used natural rock shapes. Its head is very small, but the edge of the rock panel above it follows the curve of a horse’s head and neck, as if the stone itself formed part of the animal. Many visitors and researchers see this as a deliberate choice.

Some researchers also see the outline of a large fish, drawn in red, over the back of the right-hand horse. Red dots and other signs appear nearby. As often in cave art, it is hard to tell which elements were made together and which were added later.

Hand stencils

Around the horses are six negative hand stencils. They were made by placing a hand flat against the rock and blowing or spraying pigment around it, leaving a clear outline. Hand stencils appear in many Ice Age caves, including the Gargas cave hand stencils in the Pyrenees, and similar prints are known from Indonesia, Australia and South America.

In the 1990s the French archaeologist Michel Lorblanchet, who studied the cave for many years, tried to reproduce the horses himself. He found that spraying pigment from his mouth, sometimes through his hand or a simple screen, could produce the dots, soft outlines and stencils seen on the panel. His experiments showed that the technique was practical, though they cannot prove exactly how the originals were made.

Dating the panel

In the 1990s, charcoal used in the black paint was dated with accelerator radiocarbon dating, a method that needs only tiny samples. The result placed the horses in the Gravettian period, roughly 29,000 to 25,000 years ago in calendar years. This makes them much older than the paintings of Lascaux and broadly similar in age to the hand stencils of Gargas.

The rest of the cave

Pech Merle contains much more than the horses. The decorated galleries extend for hundreds of metres, and the paintings appear among dramatic natural formations such as stalagmites, columns and unusual disc-shaped concretions.

• The Black Frieze: a long panel of animals drawn in black outline, including mammoths, bison, horses and aurochs, often counted at around 25 figures. Its style suggests it may be younger than the spotted horses, but it has not been dated as precisely.
• The Ceiling of Hieroglyphs: a ceiling covered with finger tracings in soft clay, including meandering lines and simple animal and female outlines.
• Wounded man figures: simple human figures crossed by lines, which some researchers interpret as wounded or pierced people. Their meaning is unknown.
• Footprints: footprints preserved in the clay of one gallery, generally attributed to an adolescent or young person who walked through the cave in the Ice Age.

The cave also preserves traces of animals that used it, including scratches and hollows left by cave bears. Taken together, these features give a rare sense of the cave as a place that people and animals moved through, not just a gallery of pictures.

Spotted horses and genetics

For a long time many researchers argued that the spots on the Pech Merle horses were symbolic rather than realistic. They noted that dots also cover the rock outside the horses’ bodies, and that spotted coat patterns were thought to belong to domestic breeds such as the modern Appaloosa, which appeared only after horses were tamed.

In 2011 a team led by Melanie Pruvost published a study of ancient horse DNA in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. They tested genes linked to coat colour in 31 horses from Pleistocene and early Holocene sites across Europe and Siberia. Most were bay or black, but six carried the leopard-complex variant that produces spotted coats in modern horses.

The authors concluded that all the main coat colours shown in Palaeolithic art, including leopard spotting, existed in wild horses at the time. They suggested that the Pech Merle artists may have been depicting animals they actually saw. Later genetic work has shown that horses carrying two copies of the leopard-complex variant tend to suffer from a form of night blindness, which may help explain why the trait became less common in some later populations.

The debate is not completely closed. Real horses may have inspired the image, while the extra dots around the animals suggest that the painters were also expressing ideas we can no longer read. Most scholars now see the panel as combining observation and symbolism.

Myths and facts

Myth: the spotted horses must be domestic horses. Fact: the panel is many thousands of years older than horse domestication, which most researchers place on the Eurasian steppe after about 3500 BC, with early evidence from sites such as those of the Botai culture still debated. Spotted wild horses existed in Ice Age Europe.

Myth: all the paintings at Pech Merle were made at the same time. Fact: the decoration probably accumulated over a long period, and different panels may differ in age by thousands of years.

Myth: the cave is closed like Lascaux. Fact: Pech Merle remains open to limited numbers of visitors, with strict controls on lighting, temperature and visitor numbers to protect the paintings.

By the numbers

Timeline

• c. 33,000-24,000 years ago: The Gravettian culture spreads across Europe.
• c. 29,000-25,000 years ago: The spotted horses panel is painted, according to radiocarbon dating of its charcoal.
• Later Upper Palaeolithic (date uncertain): Further panels, possibly including the Black Frieze, are added; the prehistoric entrance is later blocked by collapse.
• 1922: André David, Marthe David and Henri Dutertre discover the decorated galleries.
• 1926: The cave opens to the public after work by Abbé Amédée Lemozi.
• 1990s: Radiocarbon dating of the horses and experiments by Michel Lorblanchet.
• 2011: Ancient DNA study shows leopard-spotted horses existed in Ice Age Europe.

Why it matters

Pech Merle shows how Ice Age artists combined observation, natural rock shapes and abstract signs in a single image. The spotted horses have become a test case for how science, from radiocarbon dating to ancient DNA, can shed new light on prehistoric art. And because the original cave can still be visited, it offers a rare direct encounter with art made almost 30,000 years ago.