Small, deadly, and set in stone

THE Niaux cave, in the foothills of the French Pyrenees, is famous for its prehistoric art. Visiting it last month was an exhilarating experience.

In a chamber, known as the ‘Salon Noir’, animals are depicted in profile. Why people travelled a kilometre underground, by the light of primitive torches 13,000 years ago, to create such images, is a mystery.

Art works at the Chauvet Cave in the Ardèche are up to 34,000 years old. Their style, however, is similar to those at Niaux, produced 20,000 years later. Such a timescale is hard to grasp. It is 2,000 years since the time of Christ. The interval between the drawings in these two caves is ten times that.

The pictures are superimposed on each other, looking like graffiti to our eyes. However, they would not have appeared so to the people who produced them; this stylistic convention is found throughout Stone Age art. Drawn with a few sweeps of the brush, they are the work of skilled craftsmen; no errors, corrections or modifications appear.

The most unusual creation at Niaux is a drawing (which can’t be visited) of a weasel-like animal. Given the Stone-Age penchant for big creatures, you might expect it to be of a wolverine, the largest of the weasel tribe; males can weigh 30kg or more. Found, nowadays, only beyond the Arctic Circle, it was probably in southern France during the Ice Age when the Niaux artists were working. However, the wolverine is a somewhat stouter and bulkier creature than the one depicted. Nor does it resemble an otter, while the legs are too short to be those of a pine-marten. It is, most likely, what the French call ‘la belette’, the weasel, or its slightly larger cousin ‘l’ermine’, the stoat. Executed in about ten sweeps of the brush, this is the world’s first depiction of either of these animals and, I was told, the only one found in the 300 or so decorated caves of Europe and Asia.

Cave art celebrates large creatures; mammoths, bison and cave-lions. Featuring the tiniest European carnivore, therefore, seems odd. However, it could be argued that weasels and stoats deserve a place in the pantheon of extreme beasts. Gram for gram, they are the greatest killers of the mammal world, more blood-thirsty than any big cat. A lion eats less than 4% of its body weight per day. According to James Fairley’s A Basket of Weasels, an Irish stoat’s daily meat requirement is almost a third of its weight. A serial killer, its aggression is on a hair trigger; once inside a chicken coop, a stoat will kill everything in sight. This is not mere gratuitous violence; encountering several vulnerable animals together in the wild, it will kill as many as possible, storing the carcasses for later consumption. Perhaps the Stone Age artists, hunter gatherers whose survival depended on an intimate knowledge of the ways of wild creatures, knew something of this animal’s lethal lifestyle.

According to Fairley, male stoats can be sexual predators. They will mate with baby females, still blind and deaf in the nest. A father may even impregnate his infant daughters which become fertile when only three weeks old. Following delayed implantation, they will give birth in due course. The stoat’s aggressive lifestyle is dictated by its size and shape; 90% of its food intake goes on heat generation. Small creatures have difficulty keeping warm. Small things have a large surface area per unit volume and so cool quickly. Body shape is another heat-loss factor. Weasels and stoats are long and skinny, the better to penetrate narrow spaces. However, thin snake-like creatures have low volume-to-surface area ratios. A stoat must kill every day, whereas a lion will go happily for five days without food.

People will persuade you that we have weasels in Ireland. We haven’t. The animal known here as a weasel is the stoat. We are not alone in this confusion. At least ten European and American species are referred to as ‘weasels’. ‘Weasel words’ are ones which create a misleading, and malevolent, impression. Some blame Shakespeare for the term; “I can suck melancholy out of a song as the weasel sucks eggs” declares Jacques in As You Like It, although there is no actual evidence that weasels do such a thing.