Reflections on an Ice Age Woman
"The Woman of Cussac" - Aquitaine, France Photo: CNP, Ministère de la Culture. Source They saw mammoths and giant cave bears. At some point, they carved her on a cave wall in what would one day become France. Her people lived and loved and died during the last great ice age. This is a carving of a woman in profile from Grotte de Cussac (or Cussac Cave), discovered in 2000. Its walls are etched with overlapping, interlaced art of bison, mammoths, bovines, horses, and humans dating to around 29,000 BCE during the upper paleolithic period. It is one of the very few Paleolithic caves to contain human remains. Her people were part of what anthropologists call the Gravettian, a nomadic hunter-gatherer group that ranged across much of Europe. This carving shares much stylistically with other examples of Gravettian art such as the Woman of Laussel (pictured below) and the famous figurine Woman of Willendorf . Dozens of these images, often referred to anachronistically as ...