The Cave and the Cathedral: How a Real-Life Indiana Jones and a Renegade Scholar Decoded the Ancient Art of Man

267 Pages·2009·3.25 MB·English

by  Amir D. Aczel

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The Cave and the
Cathedral
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Books by Amir Aczel
The Jesuit and the Skull: Teilhard de Chardin, Evolution,
and the Search of Peking Man
The Artist nd the Mathematician: The Story of
Nicola Bourbaki, the Genius Mathematician
Who Never Existed
Descartes’s Secret Notebook: A True Tale of
Mathematics, Mysticism, and the Quest to Understand
the Universe
Chance: A Guide to Gambling, Love, the Stock Market,
and Just About Everything Else
Entanglement: The Greatest Mystery in Physics
Pendulum: Leon Foucault and the Triumph of Science
The Riddle of the Compass: The Invention That Changed
the World
The Mystery of the Aleph: Mathematics, the Kabbalah, and
the Search for Infi nity
God’s Equation: Einstein, Relativity, and the Expanding
Universe
Fermat’s Last Theorem: Unlocking the Secret of an Ancient
Mathematical Problem
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The Cave and the
Cathedral
How a Real-Life Indiana Jones and
a Renegade Scholar Decoded
the Ancient Art of Man
AMIR D. ACZEL
John Wiley & Sons, Inc.
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This book is printed on acid-free paper.
Copyright © 2009 by Amir D. Aczel. All rights reserved
Published by John Wiley & Sons, Inc., Hoboken, New Jersey
Published simultaneously in Canada
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data:
Aczel, Amir D.
The cave and the cathedral: how a real-life Indiana Jones and a renegade
scholar decoded the ancient art of man / Amir D. Aczel.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-470-37353-8 (cloth: alk. paper)
1. Paleolithic period. 2. Magdalenian culture. 3. Cave paintings.
4. Painting, Prehistoric 5. Niaux Cave (France) 6. Lascaux Cave (France)
7. Chauvet Cave (France) 8. Antiquities, Prehistoric. I. Title.
GN771.A28 2009
930.1—dc22
2009006816
Printed in the United States of America
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
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To Miriam, who ventured into
the depths of Combarelles
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Contents
Preface ix
Acknowledgments xiii
1. The Adventure of Niaux 1
2. The Greatest Mystery 13
3. The Neanderthal Enigma 25
4. The Roots of Language 35
5. Abbé Breuil 41
6. Font-de-Gaume and Combarelles 47
7. The Tale of a Missing Dog 55
8. The Sign of the Bull and the Legend of the
Minotaur 61
9. Rouffi gnac and Pech Merle 71
10. The Discovery of Lascaux 83
11. The Enigma of the Pit 93
12. The Groundbreaking Work of Annette
Laming-Emperaire 99
13. Prehistoric Objets d’Art 107
14. The Sign of the Hand 115
vii
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viii CONTENTS
15. The Legend of the White Lady 123
16. Shamans of the Tundra 139
17. Stonehenge and Signs in the Sky 157
18. The Mediterranean, Australia, and Patagonia 169
19. Leroi-Gourhan’s Theory 179
20. The Relationship between Signs and Animals 193
21. The Chauvet Cave 207
Notes 223
References 229
Illustration Credits 233
Index 234
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