Cave of Forgotten Dreams Page #6

We suspect that sometimes

they used feathers to a very... -

to keep the direction

at the moment of the throw.

I will try to show you

how to kill a horse.

Okay.

His efforts

may not look very convincing,

but this is a powerful weapon.

Spearheads have been found

deeply embedded

in the shoulder blades

of horses and mammoths.

- You see the fly?

It's very straight,

and it's 30 meters.

But stay here.

The Paleolithic man

was better than you, I guess.

- Oh, I suspect.

It could be

really difficult for me

with such a shot

to kill a horse, really.

By mid-April,

scientific research has ended

for the year.

Now we are allowed full access

to the cave,

but even that is restricted

to a single week,

four hours a day.

The famous cave of Lascaux

had to be shut down

because the breath

of scores of tourists

has caused mold to grow

on the walls.

We enter Chauvet Cave

aware that this may be

the only and last opportunity

to film inside.

The mystery of the Minotaur

and the female began to unfold

when our guides allowed us

to mount a small camera

on a stick

with which we reached out.

The bison seems to embrace

the sex of a naked woman.

- Traditional people

and, I think,

people of the Paleolithic

had very probably some... -

two concepts which change

our vision of the world.

They're the concept of fluidity

and the concept of permeability.

Fluidity means that

the categories that we have... -

man, woman, horse, I don't know,

tree, et cetera... -

can shift.

A tree may speak.

A man can get transformed

into an animal

and the other way around,

given certain circumstances.

The concept of permeability

is that there are no barriers,

so to speak,

between the world where we are

and the world of the spirits.

A wall can talk to us,

or a wall can accept us

or refuse us.

A shaman, for example,

can send his or her spirit

to the world

of the supernatural

or can receive the visit,

inside him or her,

of supernatural spirits.

If you put those two concepts

together,

you realize how different

life must have been

for those people

from the way we live now.

Humans have been described

in many ways, right?

And for a while,

it was Homo sapiens

and is still called

Homo sapiens,

"the man who knows."

I don't think

it's a good definition at all.

We don't know.

We don't know much.

I would think Homo spiritualis.

The strongest hint

of something spiritual,

some religious ceremony

in the cave,

is this bear skull.

It has been placed dead center

on a rock resembling an altar.

The staging seems deliberate.

The skull faces the entrance

of the cave,

and around it, fragments

of charcoal were found

potentially used as incense.

What exactly took place here,

only the paintings

could tell us.

- If you want to have

an understanding of it,

you must go outside of the cave.

I mean, you must start from

the cave and then go outside.

How far outside?

Where would you go?

- Well, I would say everywhere

but with... -

to have a look

at different culture

would be a very good way

to better understand

how different culture

could have coped with rock art,

for example, in Australia,

in North America,

or in South Africa.

Aborigines in Australia

who lived until recently

almost like Stone Age people.

- Sure, for example,

because they used to paint

and to create rock art

until the 1970s,

and in some places,

I think there still are

some traditions

of creating rock art.

Well, of course it has changed

since the beginning

of the century,

when they were discovered,

but it can tell us

different ways

of looking at rock art

which are not our way

of looking at rock art.

Do you have an example?

- Yeah, sure, of course.

In north Australia, for example,

in the 1970s,

an ethnographer was on the field

with an aborigine

who was his informer,

and once they arrived

in a rock shelter.

And in that rock shelter,

there were some

beautiful paintings,

but they were decaying.

And the aborigine

started to become sad

because he saw

the paintings decaying.

And in that region,

there is a tradition

of touching up the paintings

time after time,

so he sat, and he started

to touch up the paintings.

So the ethnographer

asked the question

that every Western person

would have asked.

"Why are you painting?"

And the man answered,

and his answer

is very troubling,

because he answered,

"I am not.

"I am not painting.

"That's the hand, only hand,

spirit who is actually

painting now."

The hand of a spirit.

- Yeah, because the man

is a part of the spirit.

Do you think that

the paintings in Chauvet Cave

were somehow the beginning

of the modern human soul?

What constitutes humanness?

- Humanness

is a very good adaptation

with the... - in the world.

So the soc... -

the human society

needs to adaptate

to the landscape,

to the other beings,

the animals,

to other human groups

and to communicate something,

to communicate it

and to inscribe the memory

on very specific

and hard things,

like walls, like pieces of wood,

like bones,

this is invention

of Cro-Magnon.

And how about music?

- And... - yes, and also things,

mythology, music.

But with the invention

of the figuration... -

figuration of animals, of men,

of things... -

it's a way of communication

between humans

and with the future

to evocate the past,

to transmit information

that is very better

than language,

than oral communication.

And this invention is still

the same in our world today... -

with this camera, for example.

On the Rhone River

is one of the largest nuclear

power plants in France.

The Chauvet Cave is located

only 20 miles as the crow flies

beyond these hills

in the background.

A surplus of warm water,

which has been used

to cool these reactors,

is diverted half a mile away

to create a tropical biosphere.

Warm steam

fills enormous greenhouses,

and the site is expanding.

Crocodiles have been introduced

into this brooding jungle,

and warmed by water

to cool the reactor,

man, do they thrive.

There are already

hundreds of them.

Not surprisingly,

mutant albinos swim and breed

in these waters.

A thought is born

of this surreal environment.

Not long ago, just a few

ten thousands of years back,

there were glaciers here

And now a new climate

is steaming and spreading.

Fairly soon, these albinos

might reach Chauvet Cave.

Looking at the paintings,

what will they make of them?

Nothing is real.

Nothing is certain.

It is hard to decide

whether or not

these creatures here

are dividing

into their own doppelgaengers.

And do they really meet,

or is it just their own

imaginary mirror reflection?

Are we today

possibly the crocodiles

who look back into an abyss

of time

when we see the paintings

of Chauvet Cave?

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