Être ou ne pas être aurignaciens ?… Telle est la question pour les Mégacéros de la grotte Chauvet

Abstract

From a stylistic analysis (taking into account measures, graphic conventions, transcription of details, degree of achievement of the figures and the accompanying animals) and with reference to the different styles that follow on over time (as established by Leroi-Gourhan), it becomes possible to construct a comparative study of forty-nine figures of megaloceros taking the census of all the art of decorated caves in the superior Paleolithic. This report established the presence of the giant deer only from the Gravettian on the walls of caves in Spain and France with a progression towards naturalism of workmanship at the end of the Solutrean at the transition with the initial Magdalenian. Contrary to currently received opinion, the workmanship of the figures oscillates, according to the followers of a “post-stylistic era”, from an outgrowth drawing (although still unfinished) at the Aurignacian to a more summary illustration at the Gravettian, to find again the initial quality at the Solutrean-Magdalenian (7000 to 12,000 years later) sketching representations almost in the same way. It would be an “unicum” in the prehistory of art which gives it little plausibility, so it would be contravening all our knowledge about the subject.