Cave of Forgotten Dreams Page #4

You can see all the signs

of fury towards each other,

the movement of their legs,

which are thrown forward,

and you can almost hear

the sound

of their horns colliding

against each other

in the movement of the fight.

Here you have another story,

a story of lions,

a male courting a female

who is not ready for mating.

She sits and growls.

Look, you can hear

the female growling.

She's raising her lips.

She's baring her teeth.

She is not happy.

And here, to finish off,

you have the flight

of this bison.

We hear the hooves.

We can make out multiple legs

indicating its movement.

It is escaping

from this alcove,

following this auroch.

Madame Baffier

takes us down

to the farthest chamber

of the cave,

the mysterious chamber

of the lions.

There is a serious level

of toxic CO2 gas

emanating from the roots

of trees,

which seeps down into the cave

through the porous limestone.

Our time is even more

constricted in this location,

and there is no possibility

to get close to the paintings.

- Unfortunately,

there are things you won't

be able to show in your film

and you won't be able to see.

You can't get closer.

That is the case with these

absolutely marvelous paintings

in the farthest chamber,

this grouping of lions.

It is especially the case

with this rock pendant,

where the lower portion

of a woman's body

has been painted.

That is, you have

her pubic triangle

and her legs that separate,

starting at the knee,

which diverge

and are reminiscent

of the well-known small

early Stone Age statuettes

from archaeological digs

in the Swabian Jura in Germany.

We can only see part of this

lower half of a female body,

because we cannot access

the other side of the pendant.

You can not walk

on these grounds,

because they are too fragile.

You would destroy

the charcoal remains.

You would destroy the tracks

left by the bears

and the humans.

So you'll have to make do

with this partial image.

If you completed the other half

of this female body

with its other legs

symmetrically,

you could see that it is

connected to a bison head

that would have

a somewhat human arm.

And here we are,

some 30,000 years later,

with a myth that has endured

until our days.

We can also find

this association

of female and bull

in Picasso's drawings

of the Minotaur and the woman.

This is the only

partial representation

of a human

in the entire cave.

For the time being,

the other side

of the rock pendant

must remain unreachable for us.

The people who created this

are equally enigmatic.

Of the few things

they left behind,

practical items

like flint tools

can be more easily read.

- All the boxes...

The local museum

is filled

with artifacts from the region.

- Because we have made

some excavation in the site.

But Jean-Michel Geneste

- can only lead us

to a handful of findings

from Chauvet Cave.

- Things are preserved.

You have only two, three boxes

in this area,

but I have prepared

for you some...

To shed light

on the enigmatic female image,

he has prepared some similar

figurines from other regions.

- Very precious for archaeology.

You can see,

like in this Willendorf Venus,

it's a copy made in limestone,

found in Austria,

from the same period.

In the Chauvet Cave,

you have only the lower part

of the belly preserved.

It's embedded in a bison.

There seems

to have existed

a visual convention

extending all the way

beyond Baywatch.

- No male representation

very clearly found

but this lion man.

It comes from a site,

Hohlenstein-Stadel

in Swabian Alps.

What is amazing, it's a mixture

between

an anthropomorphic shape,

a human body,

and the head of a lion.

Is it the spirit of the... -

of a lion in a man?

Is it a marriage?

Is it a new being?

That's a question we can ask

to this reproduction.

What the people

who lived in this valley

left behind

is their great art.

It was not

a primitive beginning

or a slow evolution,;

it rather burst onto the scene

like a sudden explosive event.

It is as if the modern

human soul had awakened here.

Even more astonishing to

consider is that at the time,

Neanderthal man still roamed

this valley.

But there must have been other

forms of artistic expression,

like music, for example.

For this, we had to look around

in nearby regions.

Southwestern Germany

was connected to this valley

through an ice-free corridor.

It should also be noted that

the Alp Mountains were covered

by 9,000 feet of ice,

binding so much water

that the sea level

was 300 feet lower than today.

A hunter could have walked

from Paris to London

crossing the dry seabed

of the English Channel.

Walking 400 miles

in this direction

would lead you

to the Swabian Alb of Germany.

There, in the museum

of Blaubeuren,

we find replicas of the

best-known Paleolithic Venuses.

But this one, the Venus

of Hohle Fels, stands out.

Found in 2008,

it is sensational for its age.

- The Venus from Hohle Fels

is probably the oldest depiction

of any kind of figurative object

we know at all.

It's the earliest representation

of a human being,

and it's the absolute root

of figurative depiction

as we know it.

Later on, we see a range

of animals being depicted.

We can think of the animal

depictions in ivory here

or the fabulous depictions

from Grotte Chauvet

of mammoths, of lions,

and we can see

a very clear connection

between the Swabian finds

and the depictions in Chauvet.

What's also fascinating

is that at this time,

we see evidence

for musical instruments,

a range of personal ornaments,

mythical depictions

that clearly show

that these people had

a religious concept

evolving the transformation

between humans and animals.

This here

is the original statuette

carved from a mammoth tusk.

- If we look at the Venus of

Hohle Fels a bit more closely,

we can see very clearly,

for instance,

that the figurine has no head,

right?

Instead of a head,

the figurine has a ring.

It was perhaps worn at times,

suspended on a string

of some sort.

Also, the sexual attributes

are key,

which clearly link

this depiction

to ideas of reproduction,

fecundity, sexuality,

ideas that are

absolutely essential

to all of humanity also today.

It's also important to realize

that at this time,

much of Europe was occupied

by Neanderthals.

So we're dealing

with the critical phase

in human evolution

where two forms of human beings

are testing their boundaries.

And what we find

over and over again

is that Neanderthals,

although they're

very sophisticated,

they never had this kind

of symbolic artifact ever.

This small ivory mammoth

was also found

near Hohle Fels cave.

And this beautiful horse

comes from the same region.

They also found fragments

of flutes.

We asked Dr. Conard

to show us an original.

- The ivory flute is really

a remarkable artifact

that Maria Malina discovered

a few years back,

and I think

what's extremely important

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