Henri Lhote (16 March 1903 – 26 March 1991) was a French explorer,

ethnographer Ethnography (from Greek ''ethnos'' "folk, people, nation" and ''grapho'' "I write") is a branch of anthropology and the systematic study of individual cultures. Ethnography explores cultural phenomena from the point of view of the subject o ...

, and discoverer of prehistoric cave art. He is credited with the discovery of an assembly of 800 or more works of

primitive art Tribal art is the visual arts and material culture of indigenous peoples. Also known as non-Western art or ethnographic art, or, controversially, primitive art, Dutton, Denis, Tribal Art'. In Michael Kelly (editor), ''Encyclopedia of Aesthetics. ...

in a remote region of

Algeria ) , image_map = Algeria (centered orthographic projection).svg , map_caption = , image_map2 = , capital = Algiers , coordinates = , largest_city = capital , relig ...

on the edge of the

Sahara desert , photo = Sahara real color.jpg , photo_caption = The Sahara taken by Apollo 17 astronauts, 1972 , map = , map_image = , location = , country = , country1 = , ...

."Paintings from the Past" in the January/February 1983 print edition of ''Saudi Aramco World''
/ref> Lhote came to believe the paintings testified to ancient contact with extraterrestrial beings and is considered one of the early proponents of paleocontact.Lhote, Henri. ''The Search for the Tassili Frescoes: The story of the prehistoric rock-paintings of the Sahara''. New York: E. P. Dutton.
/ref>Ita, J.M., 'Frobenius, Lhote and Saharan Studies', in ''African Studies Review'' Vol. 17 no. 1 (April 1974), pp. 286–306.

Biography

Lhote was orphaned at age 12 and subsequently became a boy scout, where he learned about anthropology. He was largely self-taught until he became a pupil and protégé of

Abbé Breuil Henri Édouard Prosper Breuil (28 February 1877 – 14 August 1961), often referred to as Abbé Breuil, was a French Catholic priest, archaeologist, anthropologist, ethnologist and geologist. He is noted for his studies of cave art in the Somme an ...

, a great expert on prehistoric cave art in France. He began to do fieldwork in anthropology in 1929 but his work was often contested due to his lack of credentials. In 1945, at the age of 42, he finally obtained a doctorate under the direction of

Marcel Griaule Marcel Griaule (16 May 1898 – 23 February 1956) was a French author and anthropologist known for his studies of the Dogon people of West Africa, and for pioneering ethnographic field studies in France. He worked together with Germaine Die ...

. He led unsuccessful expeditions to

Hoggar The Hoggar Mountains ( ar, جبال هقار, Berber: ''idurar n Ahaggar'') are a highland region in the central Sahara in southern Algeria, along the Tropic of Cancer. The mountains cover an area of approximately 550,000 km. Geography Thi ...

and

Teffedest Mountains The Teffedest Mountains are a mountain range in southern Algeria. They are part of the Hoggar Mountains (Ahaggar Mountains), located in the Sahara. Geography The Teffedest Range is about 120 km long in a north-south direction. Unlike the re ...

in 1949-1950.Bruno Lecoquierre, « Monique VÉRITÉ, Henri Lhote – Une aventure scientifique au Sahara », Insaniyat / إنسانيات nline 51-52 , 2011, consulted 1 November 2017. URL : http://insaniyat.revues.org/12835

Discovery of Tassili

Lhote met and befriended a French soldier named Charles Brennans who had discovered rock paintings and engravings in a remote, uninhabited zone on the edge of the

Sahara desert , photo = Sahara real color.jpg , photo_caption = The Sahara taken by Apollo 17 astronauts, 1972 , map = , map_image = , location = , country = , country1 = , ...

, while on an exploratory mission there in the 1930s. The artwork was on

sandstone Sandstone is a clastic sedimentary rock composed mainly of sand-sized (0.0625 to 2 mm) silicate grains. Sandstones comprise about 20–25% of all sedimentary rocks. Most sandstone is composed of quartz or feldspar (both silicates) ...

cliffs in a deep

wadi Wadi ( ar, وَادِي, wādī), alternatively ''wād'' ( ar, وَاد), North African Arabic Oued, is the Arabic term traditionally referring to a valley. In some instances, it may refer to a wet (ephemeral) riverbed that contains water onl ...

of a barren

plateau In geology and physical geography, a plateau (; ; ), also called a high plain or a tableland, is an area of a highland consisting of flat terrain that is raised sharply above the surrounding area on at least one side. Often one or more sides ha ...

known as Tassili-n-ajjer, and included depictions of elephants, giraffes, rhinoceroses, and strange human figures. With the help of Brennans, and with financial support from the

Musée de l'Homme The Musée de l'Homme ( French, "Museum of Mankind" or "Museum of Humanity") is an anthropology museum in Paris, France. It was established in 1937 by Paul Rivet for the 1937 ''Exposition Internationale des Arts et Techniques dans la Vie Moderne' ...

in Paris, Lhote mounted an expedition to investigate. They landed in

Djanet Djanet ( ar, جانت) is an oasis city, and capital of Djanet District as well as of Djanet Province, southeast Algeria. It is located south of Illizi. According to the 2008 census it has a population of 14,655, up from 9,699 in 1998, and an an ...

in February 1956 and made their way over land to Tassili. Lhote later wrote that he had never seen anything "so extraordinary, so original, so beautiful" as the art at Tassili n'Ajjer. Over 16 months in 1956 and 1957 Lhote and his associates discovered about 800 paintings, many of which he documented with the aid of painters and photographers. These images were presented in 1957 and 1958 at the Musée des Arts Décoratifs in

Paris Paris () is the capital and most populous city of France, with an estimated population of 2,165,423 residents in 2019 in an area of more than 105 km² (41 sq mi), making it the 30th most densely populated city in the world in 2020. S ...

and were, in the opinion of the writer and politician

André Malraux Georges André Malraux ( , ; 3 November 1901 – 23 November 1976) was a French novelist, art theorist, and minister of cultural affairs. Malraux's novel ''La Condition Humaine'' (Man's Fate) (1933) won the Prix Goncourt. He was appointed by P ...

, "one of the most defining exhibitions of the mid-century".Jeremy Keenan, ''The Lesser Gods of the Sahara: Social Change and Indigenous Rights'', London: Frank Cass Publishers, 2004, p. 163 ff. Lhote mounted three subsequent expeditions to Tassili between 1958 and 1962.

Ancient Astronauts

In his book ''The Search for the Tassili Frescoes: The story of the prehistoric rock-paintings of the Sahara'' (1958), Lhote publicized the hypothesis that the humanoid drawings at Tassili represented

space alien Extraterrestrial life, colloquially referred to as alien life, is life that may occur outside Earth and which did not originate on Earth. No extraterrestrial life has yet been conclusively detected, although efforts are underway. Such life might ...

s. He baptized one particularly large and curious figure "Jabbaren" and described him as the "great

Martian Mars, the fourth planet from the Sun, has appeared as a setting in works of fiction since at least the mid-1600s. It became the most popular celestial object in fiction in the late 1800s as the Moon was evidently lifeless. At the time, the pr ...

god." The

popular press Mass media refers to a diverse array of media technologies that reach a large audience via mass communication. The technologies through which this communication takes place include a variety of outlets. Broadcast media transmit information ...

gave a lot of attention to this hypothesis of a prehistoric

close encounter In ufology, a close encounter is an event in which a person witnesses an unidentified flying object. This terminology and the system of classification behind it were first suggested in astronomer and UFO researcher J. Allen Hynek's 1972 book ''T ...

, and Lhote's arguments were later incorporated into the evidence assembled by

Erich von Däniken Erich Anton Paul von Däniken (; ; born 14 April 1935) is a Swiss author of several books which make claims about extraterrestrial influences on early human culture, including the best-selling ''Chariots of the Gods?'', published in 1968. Von D ...

for the thesis that ancient extraterrestrial

astronaut An astronaut (from the Ancient Greek (), meaning 'star', and (), meaning 'sailor') is a person trained, equipped, and deployed by a human spaceflight program to serve as a commander or crew member aboard a spacecraft. Although generally r ...

s visited the Earth in prehistoric times. However, mainstream scientists regard the "great Martian god" and other rock art figures of Tassili as representations of ordinary humans in

ritual A ritual is a sequence of activities involving gestures, words, actions, or objects, performed according to a set sequence. Rituals may be prescribed by the traditions of a community, including a religious community. Rituals are characterized, b ...

mask A mask is an object normally worn on the face, typically for protection, disguise, performance, or entertainment and often they have been employed for rituals and rights. Masks have been used since antiquity for both ceremonial and practic ...

s and

costume Costume is the distinctive style of dress or cosmetic of an individual or group that reflects class, gender, profession, ethnicity, nationality, activity or epoch. In short costume is a cultural visual of the people. The term also was tradition ...

s rather than

extraterrestrial lifeform Extraterrestrial life, colloquially referred to as alien life, is life that may occur outside Earth and which did not originate on Earth. No extraterrestrial life has yet been conclusively detected, although efforts are underway. Such life might ...

s. For instance a dance scene that Lhote discovered in 1956 can be attributed on stylistic grounds to

Neolithic The Neolithic period, or New Stone Age, is an Old World archaeological period and the final division of the Stone Age. It saw the Neolithic Revolution, a wide-ranging set of developments that appear to have arisen independently in several parts ...

hunters who lived in the area (which was then fertile) around 6,000 to 8,000 years ago.

Re-evaluation

In 2003 the British anthropologist

Jeremy Keenan Jeremy Keenan (born 1945) is a British social anthropologist. The regional focuses of his research are the Sahara, North Africa and the Sahel region, and he concentrates on anthropology of development, security and globalisation. He has publis ...

undertook a review of Lhote's publications and concluded that "many of the claims of the expedition's leader, Henri Lhote, were misleading, a number of the paintings were faked, and the copying process was fraught with errors." Keenan also found that the political context of French colonization of Algeria had influenced the treatment of the site and the interpretation of the artworks. In particular he singled out

as "the arch-advocate of foreign influence in African rock art." He alleged that the expedition's methods caused damage to the rock art and "sterilized the archaeological landscape".

Namesakes

The "Ouan Lhote Area" and the "Henri Lhote Arch" in Tassili National Park are named after him. A

species In biology, a species is the basic unit of classification and a taxonomic rank of an organism, as well as a unit of biodiversity. A species is often defined as the largest group of organisms in which any two individuals of the appropriate s ...

North African North Africa, or Northern Africa is a region encompassing the northern portion of the African continent. There is no singularly accepted scope for the region, and it is sometimes defined as stretching from the Atlantic shores of Mauritania in t ...

lizard, '' Philochortus lhotei'', was named in his honour.Beolens, Bo; Watkins, Michael; Grayson, Michael (2011). ''The Eponym Dictionary of Reptiles''. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. xiii + 296 pp. . ("Lhote", p. 157).

Selected publications

* ''Aux prises avec le Sahara'', (Les œuvres françaises, Paris, 1936). * ''Le Sahara, désert mystérieux'', (Editions Bourrelier, Paris, 1937; 1949). *
L'extraordinaire aventure des Peuls
'. Présence Africaine. Paris. Oct.-Nov. 1959. pp. 48–57 * ''Les Touaregs du Hoggar'', (Payot, Paris, 1944; 1955; A. Colon, Paris, 1984). * ''Le Niger en kayak'', (Editions J. Susse, Paris, 1946). * ''Dans les campements touaregs'', (Les œuvres françaises, Paris, 1947). * ''La chasse chez les Touaregs'', (Amiot-Dumont, Paris, 1951). * ''A la découverte des fresques du Tassili'', (Arthaud, Paris, 1958, 1973, 1992, 2006). * ''L'épopée du Ténéré'', (Gallimard, Paris, 1961). * ''Les gravures rupestres du Sud-oranais'', (Arts et Métiers graphiques, Paris, 1970). * ''Les gravures rupestres de l'Oued Djerat'', (SNED, Algiers, 1976). * ''Vers d'autres Tassilis'', (Arthaud, Paris, 1976). * ''Chameau et dromadaire en Afrique du Nord et au Sahara''. Recherche sur leurs origines, (ONAPSA, Alger, 1987). * ''Le Sahara'', (Grandvaux, 2003).

References

External links

Rock art of the Sahara

{{DEFAULTSORT:Lhote, Henri 1903 births 1991 deaths French explorers French ethnographers Ancient astronauts proponents