Cave of Forgotten Dreams Page #2

through that precision,

through scientific methods,

but that's not, I think,

the main goal.

The main goal

is to create stories

about what could have happened

in that cave during the past.

It is like

you are creating

the phone directory

of Manhattan.

Four million precise entries,

but do they dream?

Do they cry at night?

What are their hopes?

What are their families?

You'll... - we'll never know

from the phone directory.

- Definitely.

We will never know,

because past is definitely lost.

We will never reconstruct

the past.

We can only create

a representation

of what alre... -

what exists now, today.

You are a human being.

I am a human being.

And here when you come

to that cave,

of course there are some things.

I have my own background.

What is your background,

if I may ask?

- Well, I used to be

a circus man before,

but I switched to archaeology.

Circus?

Doing what?

Lion tamer?

- Well, mostly... -

not lion tamer,

but mostly unicycle

and juggling, yeah.

The first time I entered

to Chauvet Cave,

I had a chance to get in

during five days,

and it was so powerful.

Then every night,

I was dreaming of lions.

And every day was

the same shock for me.

It was an emotional shock.

I mean, I'm a scientist

but a human too.

And after five days, I decided

not to go back in the cave,

because I needed time

just to relax and take time to... -

To absorb it?

- To absorb it, yeah.

Yeah.

And you dreamt

not of paintings of lions

but of real lions.

- Of both, of both, definitely.

Yeah.

And you were afraid

in your dreams?

- I was not afraid, no.

No, no, I was not afraid.

It was more a feeling of

powerful things and deep things,

a way to understand things

which is not a direct way.

- Uh, sorry.

Silence, please.

Please don't move.

We're going to listen

to the silence in the cave,

and perhaps we can even hear

our own heartbeats.

These images

are memories

of long-forgotten dreams.

Is this their heartbeat

or ours?

Will we ever be able

to understand the vision

of the artists

across such an abyss of time?

There is an aura of melodrame

in this landscape.

It could be straight out

of a Wagner opera

or a painting

of German Romanticists.

Could this be our connection

to them?

This staging of a landscape

as an operatic event

does not belong

to the Romanticists alone.

Stone Age men might have had

a similar sense

of inner landscapes,

and it seems natural

that there's a whole cluster

of Paleolithic caves

right around here.

- The Chauvet Cave is just here

at the top of this cliff,

but the Chauvet Cave

is also associated

to this natural feature,

this beautiful arch

called Pont d'Arc.

Maybe this Pont d'Arc,

in the mythology of the people,

was not only a landmark

but a mark also

in the imagination,

in the stories,

in the mythology

that was important for them

to understand the world.

But what kind

of world was it

for Paleolithic people

back then?

- 35,000 years ago,

the Europe... -

Europe was covered by glaciers,

and in this glacial Europe,

you have to imagine a climate

dry, cold, but with sun also.

That was important.

In this place, for example,

you have to imagine

woolly rhinos,

mammoths along the rivers.

In the forest,

you had Megaloceros deers,

horses, reindeers, bisons,

and also ibex

or the antelopes moving.

So it was very rich.

The biomass

in this part of Europe

was very important

for the development of human

but also carnivores.

So you have to imagine

lions, bears, leopards,

wolves,

foxes in very large numbers.

And among all these carnivores

and predators, human.

Could it be how they

set up fires in Chauvet Cave?

There's evidence that they cast

their own shadows

against the panels of horses,

for example.

- The fire were necessary

to look at the paintings

and maybe towards

staging people around.

When you look with the flame,

with moving light,

you can imagine people dancing

with the shadows.

Like Fred Astaire.

- Fred Astaire, yes.

I think that this image

dancing with this shadow

is a very strong and old images

of human representation,

because the first representation

was the walls,

the white wall

and the black shadow.

The presence of humans

in the cave

was fleeting like shadows.

Bear skulls everywhere,

but these skulls belong

to the cave bear,

a species, like the mammoth

and the woolly rhino,

that vanished from the face

of the Earth long ago.

Tens of thousands of years

of patient water dripping

has left a thick coating

of calcite on this skull.

It now has the appearance

of a porcelain sculpture.

In all this menagerie of bones,

there's not a single

human specimen.

Scientists have determined that

humans never lived in the cave.

They used it only for painting

and possibly ceremonies.

Michel Philipe has studied

the bones of Chauvet Cave.

Caves

constitute a favorable place

for the preservation of bones.

As the result,

there are a lot of bear bones.

Overall, this represents

but there are also some wolves.

We have two skulls

and have several bones.

We have a few ibexes.

We have a magnificent skull

on the wet sand with calcite,

quite lovely.

When you shine light on it,

they are calcite crystals

that glisten.

It's truly quite lovely.

There are some horses as well.

There is a cave hyena.

What else is there?

There's also an eagle skeleton,

a golden eagle,

practically whole,

but it may be

a little more recent,

carried in by the run of water

and wedged against the big rocks

at the edge of the waterway.

So you can see its bones

spread out

over ten feet in length.

Our goal is not only to say

what bones there are,

but we also try to understand

if they lived there,

if they were moved,

how they were transported.

Did the bears bring the bones?

There are several bones that

have been chewed on a little.

So it could have been the bears

or the hyenas.

All the scientists

are lodged

in a nearby sports complex.

Although they each have

their special field,

they compare and combine

their findings.

We were interested in the work

of these two.

Carole, Gilles, can you explain

about what you're doing here?

- Yeah, oui.

In the cave,

we are trying to reveal

the contours

of underlying designs

that are hard to follow

with the naked eye.

Because we are not supposed

to touch the wall,

we take a series of photos that

we put together in a mosaic.

We are trying to achieve

a maximum of detail.

Then we take a transparency,

and we put it

on top of the photo.

And then we trace

the underlayers of engravings.

Later, we return to the cave

and check against the contours

all the designs that we can see

and all the markings

of the bears as well

so that we can understand

each figure and event.

We have bear scratches

and then a magnificent drawing

of a mammoth done by finger

and other scratches

done over the mammoth.

So their succession

is very important

to understand what took place.

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