"Lions and men": felines, kings of an exhibition at the Chauvet cave

From Asia to Egypt, from Babylon to America, the exhibition "Lions and men", organized on the site of the Chauvet cave (Ardèche), explores the fascination of humanity for felines, through 180 exceptional works.

"Big cats have always accompanied the history of man and have been at the heart of myths and the sacred for millennia", explains Maria Gonzalez Menendez, curator of this exhibition inspired by the very numerous representations of cave lions in the Chauvet cave, which contains half of those known in all parietal art.

This is the first temporary international exhibition organized by the Chauvet 2 cave, a replica of this first masterpiece of humanity. The public will be able to discover it on Saturday, until September 22.

Star of the exhibition, the extraordinary frozen mummy of a lion cub, 46,500 years old, discovered in the ice of Siberia in 2015, is presented for the first time in France.

Kept in a special display case at -24 degrees, this tired plush baby lion is particularly well preserved, with all its hair, including whiskers, pads, musculature, internal organs...

We know that the lion cub was only a few days old when he died, prisoner of his den after a landslide. Apart from a little clay, his stomach was empty. He hadn't even had time to suckle his mother. A DNA analysis of his "brother" (or sister), found at his side, is underway in California.

In 2017, two more frozen lion cubs were unearthed in Siberia in permafrost which is thawing due to global warming.

"These are the only four in the world. Our dream would now be to discover an adult cave lion trapped in the ice," notes Dr. Albert Protopopov of the Yakutsk Academy of Sciences, who accompanied the mummy from Siberia to Ardeche.

- The oldest "art gallery" -

@slowdownjazely do I look like Shakespeare to know how to write a sonnet, no I don't

— Toe-Knee Fri Feb 21 03:02:23 +0000 2014

Near the lion cub baptized Uyan, is the reconstruction of an adult cave lion, made thanks to the discovery of a skull of this colossus of 300 kilos. Larger than the modern lion, the male had no mane.

The exhibition also shows many sculpted and engraved objects, reliefs, amulets, ceramics, busts or masks representing felines, some of which have never been exhibited in France, from prestigious national and international collections. There are also eight stuffed animals.

"What connects man and the feline is not animality but humanity", underlines the prehistorian Valérie Moles, responsible for cultural and scientific mediation at the Chauvet cave, who participated in this interdisciplinary project. .

"A new relationship with animals was established in the Aurignacian (about 40,000 years ago). Homo sapiens then had a new metaphysics, materialized through the animals represented. He adorned himself with their attributes, sculpted them , draw them,” she adds.

“Seven civilizations are found in the exhibition over 400 centuries of fascination,” enthuses Ms. Moles. Visitors will be able to admire a relief of one of the eight gates of the city of Babylon (current Iraq) dating from the 6th century BC: the Gate of Ishtar, goddess of war symbolized by a lion.

The lion is the most common animal in Near Eastern art.

Also worth discovering is the relief of a pharaoh breastfed by the goddess Sekhmet or an Egyptian gargoyle in the shape of a lion, a magnificent head of Heracles surmounted by a lion skin carved in Paros marble.

Alongside them, a zoomorphic mask from the Bamana culture (Mali) or a jade plate from the Han dynasty (China) depicting a tiger, not to mention representations of a jaguar, an animal deified as a mythical ancestor, omnipresent in pre-Columbian America. .

Discovered in December 1994, the Chauvet cave was listed as a World Heritage Site by UNESCO. With its paintings dating back 36,000 years (twice as old as those of Lascaux), it is the oldest "art gallery" in the world.