Chauvet Cave

What would that have been? And in the run-up to going, Isabel, my wife and I watched this documentary on the

cave at Chauvet, which is where the sorcerer is.

That's different to Lascaux.

And in that documentary, they talk about, and there is evidence of this at Lascaux, where they're using perspective,

which is

something that Prior to the discovery of this cave art, we thought humans had kind of invented, inverted commas, during the Renaissance.

But in Chauvet, there's an animal and they couldn't work out why there was just a head, one bit of the rock, and then further down there's a floating back of an animal.

But when you line up, you start to see the head and the body of an animal in perspective.

The cave paintings, In 1994, three French explorers discovered something that changed our understanding of ancient humans forever.

The Chauvet Cave in southern France.

When they squeezed through a narrow passage and shined their lights into a hidden chamber, they found themselves staring at the most sophisticated prehistoric art ever discovered.

lions horses rhinoceroses dozens of animals rendered with such skill such understanding of anatomy and perspective that they could have been painted yesterday except they weren't Radiocarbon dating put the paintings at 36,000 years old.

Let that sink in.

36,000 years ago, humans were creating masterpiece-level art in pitch-black caves using charcoal and ochre and manganese oxide, mixing pigments with animal fat to create paints that would last for millennia.

they were applying shading techniques to suggest three-dimensional form they were using the natural contours of the cave walls to add depth and movement to their subjects they were painting animals in ways that captured not just their appearance but their essence their motion their spirit And Chauvet isn't unique.

Lascaux Cave, Altamira Cave, dozens of sites across Europe, all showing the same incredible sophistication, the same artistic vision.

It was December 18th, 1994.

Jean-Marie Chauvet, Eliette Brunel and Christian Hilaire were exploring cliff faces along the Ardèche Gorge in southeastern France, a limestone canyon that cuts through the Rhône valley south of Lyon.

The gorge is dramatic, sheer walls of pale stone rising above the river, riddled with overhangs and alcoves, and the dark mouths of known caves.

The three cavers were systematic.

Temperature differences between the cave interior and the surface cause air to move through passages and exit through any available opening.

A crack that breathes is a crack that connects to a space large enough to hold a significant volume of air, large enough to generate thermal currents, large enough to be a cave.

Chauvet, Brunel and Hilaire knew what the draft meant.

They cleared rubble.

The big names were European.

Lascaux, Chauvet, Altamira.

If textbooks mentioned Asia at all, it was usually as an afterthought.

Then, over the past couple of decades, teams of researchers started hiking into the limestone hills of Sulawesi and the narrative quietly began to crack.

Altamira in northern Spain was the first to be discovered in modern times in the late 19th century.

But in terms of age, it sits roughly around 20,000 years ago for many of its most famous images, with some layers older and some younger.

Chauvet in southern France, which no one knew about until 1994, goes much further back.

Some of its paintings appear to date to around 36,000 years ago, maybe a bit more or less depending on how you interpret the samples and the methods used.

It crystallizes them in time.

And, you know, in Lascaux, and I think in Chauvet, those two, the large caves that, you know, that calcite film started to fall off because I know in Lascaux, people were throwing parties down there, which sounds fabulous and like so fun, but...

Not so good for the paintings.

Well, they've been sealed.

Yeah,

it corrupts it.

Those two caves, Chauvet and Lescaut, were mentioned in the movie Cave of Forgotten Dreams, right? Yeah.

If people haven't seen that movie, it's one of the best documentaries of all time, in my

Yeah, yeah.

So the first chapter in my book is written about the prehistoric cave paintings at Chauvet in the Ardèche region of France, where there is a network of caves which are decorated.

It was probably completed about 36,000 years ago.

And many of the images inside this cave are created using ochre, dried earth, crushed, potentially in the palm of the artist's hand, mixed with a little water, perhaps a little spit.

Historically, we have analysed the paints used in cave paintings.

We know that they used often things like bone marrow, even blood.

But when I went to visit Chauvet Cave, you can't actually get inside.

But I made a pilgrimage to find the entrance to the cave.

But before I talk about that, I want to talk about the image on the card and where it actually comes from.

So this image of the woolly rhinoceros comes from Chauvet Cave.

So Chauvet Cave was discovered in 1994.

So it was relatively recent in terms of a discovery.

And it's home to some of the oldest known cave art in the world.

But here we found this cave art that was 36,000 years old, and we see that this tradition continued forever.

for tens of thousands of years and that our ancestors were making art much further back than we had anticipated.

And so this was a landmark find, Chauvet Cave.

It's 18 minutes long.

And it was inspired by the cave art of Chauvet Cave in southern France, as well as the flutes found in Swabia in southern Germany, such as in Holefels and Geissenklösterle.

And the film follows a shaman and his friend, on a dream quest to make a new cave painting.

That's basically what happens in the film.

There are several paintings or drawings that have different outlines, like the legs.

You showed the bison that I copied for the beginning of the film.

There's another one in Chauvet, which is the one that got me going on this project, but has like eight legs.

Also seemed to show movement.