雅思阅读 179: The Painters in the Dark（黑暗中的画师）

改编自 Nature / Southampton University uranium-series dating（2018-2025年）。雅思阅读 Section 3 难度，约 1050 词。 素材来源：https://www.southampton.ac.uk/news/2018/02/22cave-art-dating.page

Reading Passage

A. When the three speleologists squeezed through a narrow opening in the limestone cliffs of the Ardèche in December 1994, they expected to find another decorated cave. What they found, inside the cave now named after Jean-Marie Chauvet, overturned a century of assumptions about the development of human art. The walls of the cavern — sealed off for tens of thousands of years by a collapsed entrance — carried hundreds of paintings: lions, woolly rhinoceroses, mammoths, bison, drawn with a confidence, an economy of line and a sense of volume that art historians had assumed no Upper Palaeolithic artist could possess. The animals shaded in three-quarter view, some posed in galloping motion, some outlined with black manganese and charcoal. There were hand stencils, abstract marks, even an owl scratched into the soft clay. Most shocking of all was the date: radiocarbon analysis of the charcoal used in the paintings put them at roughly 36,000 years old, far earlier than the famous galleries at Lascaux or Altamira, and almost as soon as modern humans arrived in Europe. Art, it turned out, did not evolve slowly from crude beginnings. It appeared, fully formed, almost at once. The implications for our understanding of the human mind — of when, and in whom, the capacity for representation first arose — have not yet been fully absorbed.

B. The discovery that Neanderthals, not Homo sapiens, were the earliest cave artists came a generation later, and by a more circuitous route. In 2018, a team led by Alistair Pike at Southampton used uranium-series dating — a technique that measures the decay of uranium in the thin calcite deposits that form over painted surfaces — to date the images in three Spanish caves. The method is powerful because it dates the mineral covering the paint, not the charcoal on the wall, and it works even when no organic material survives. Some of the images proved to be more than 66,000 years old, long before Homo sapiens reached western Europe. The artists, by exclusion, had to be Neanderthals. The implication was uncomfortable for a century of textbooks: the capacity to mark a wall with meaning did not emerge with our own species. It was already present in a hominin group we have long described — dismissively, and now it seems wrongly — as cognitively inferior.

C. How did these painters work? They had no artificial light except animal-fat lamps, whose charred wicks have been recovered from cave floors. They worked in sections of cavern that are sometimes hundreds of metres from the entrance, in total darkness, on surfaces chosen not for visibility but for what the rock itself offered — a bulge to represent a shoulder, a crack to serve as a backbone, a stalagmite rising naturally into a bison's horn. Pigments were ground from local minerals: red and yellow ochre from iron oxides, black from manganese dioxide or charcoal, mixed with animal fat and applied by finger, palm, mouth-blown spray through a hollow bone, or a crude brush made of chewed twig. The famous hand stencils, produced by placing a hand against the wall and spraying pigment around it, are now thought on the basis of hand-size and finger proportions to have been made by women as often as by men — a finding that has quietly overturned the old picture of male hunters alone as the artists of the ice age.

D. Why did they paint? The simplest theory — that the images were decorative, or merely reflected the animals they hunted — has not worn well. The most numerous animals in the Chauvet gallery are predators: lions, rhinoceroses, cave bears. There are almost no reindeer bones in the cave itself, and the painted beasts are not the ones the people actually ate. A second theory, once dismissed as romantic, has gained ground: that the paintings were connected to ritual, initiation and the mapping of a spiritual world. The most vivid evidence is topographic. Paintings are not distributed uniformly across the walls; they cluster in the deep, hard-to-reach chambers, while the entrance areas, where people actually lived, are comparatively bare. The most dramatic scenes — a panel of horses, a frieze of aurochs — are placed where natural rock projections make the animals appear to move as the viewer passes. Researchers have also noted that dangerous animals tend to be painted on the walls facing outward toward the world, while docile ones occupy the interior walls, as if a boundary between threat and safety was being drawn on the rock itself.

E. The legacy of this research is not just aesthetic. It tells us that the human capacity for symbol — for making a mark that stands for something absent — is far older and more broadly distributed across hominin lineages than we had assumed. If Neanderthals painted, if Chauvet appears fully formed the moment modern humans reach Europe, then art is not a late flowering of an already mature intellect. It is, rather, one of the fundamental tools with which our lineage has always thought: a way of remembering, of teaching, of confronting the animals and the dead and the dark. The caves themselves are now protected and, in many cases, closed to the public; their microclimates are too fragile to survive the breath of visitors. Visitors today experience Chauvet through a painstaking replica a few hundred metres away, painted from the same traces, in the same pigments, by the same light. The original marks, preserved by collapse, are preserved again by care. Sixty thousand years on, they remain the earliest evidence we have that the people who made them were, in the crucial respect, us. The hand that stenciled itself against the rock in the dark is, anatomically and in motive, the same hand that today reaches for a brush.

Questions 1-4

Choose the correct heading for paragraphs B, C, D and E from the list of headings below.

List of Headings i. The Chauvet discovery and its startling early date ii. Neanderthals as the earliest known cave artists iii. How the painters actually worked — materials, light and hands iv. Why they painted — ritual and the use of cave space v. The modern conservation of the caves and what the art tells us vi. The rediscovery of Lascaux in 1940 vii. How charcoal is radiocarbon-dated

1. Paragraph B: ____
2. Paragraph C: ____
3. Paragraph D: ____
4. Paragraph E: ____

Questions 5-8

Choose the correct letter, A, B, C or D.

5. Why was Chauvet's discovery so shocking to art historians? A. It contained no animals. B. The paintings were far older and far more accomplished than expected. C. It was painted by modern humans. D. The pigments were all synthetic.

6. What did the 2018 uranium-series dating of Spanish caves show? A. All the paintings were less than 10,000 years old. B. Some images were over 66,000 years old, implying Neanderthal authorship. C. Homo sapiens painted every Spanish cave. D. The dating method cannot be trusted.

7. What have studies of hand stencils suggested? A. They were made exclusively by adult males. B. Women may have made them as often as men. C. They are simply fingerprints of children. D. They have no identifiable meaning.

8. Why did the "art as decoration" theory lose favour? A. The paintings depict predators and non-eaten animals, not just prey. B. No pigments have survived. C. The caves contained no animal bones. D. The paintings are all abstract.

Questions 9-13

Do the following statements agree with the claims of the writer?

Write:

• TRUE if the statement agrees with the information
• FALSE if the statement contradicts the information
• NOT GIVEN if there is no information on this

9. Chauvet's charcoal paintings were dated to roughly 36,000 years old.
10. The 2018 study concluded that Homo sapiens reached western Europe before 66,000 years ago.
11. Painters used animal-fat lamps for light deep in the caves.
12. Dangerous animals were usually painted on the walls closest to the cave entrance.
13. The original Chauvet cave is now fully open to the public for tourism.

Questions 14-15

Complete the summary below using NO MORE THAN TWO WORDS from the passage.

The earliest known cave paintings may be the work of (14) __________, whose capacity for symbol is now thought to be much older than previously assumed. Pigments were ground from local minerals, mixed with fat, and applied by finger, palm or mouth-blown spray through a hollow (15) __________.

答案与解析

← 上一篇 | 返回雅思焦点 | 下一篇 →