You're right in the middle of it.

Uh, my, my ...

I, well, I asked this of my, my wife, and, and, and she, she suggested that most art starts with an emotion, uh, a need to express something.

And humans have been doing that, we can be fairly sure, you know, for tens of thousands of, of years, perhaps hundred- hundreds of thousands of years.

Why some people are more inclined to do it than others is, is, is, is a, is a mystery.

Perhaps you, you need certain skills, certain, certain talents to enable you to do that.

Um, that's ...

Mm

Tell us about some of your experiences there because, uh, you know, we're going back to the very roots of, you know, humanity there, and what do those paintings have to say to us about our relationship with animals back in the beginning?

It's, it's a really extraordinary experience.

You, you, you go into these caves.

The paintings are, you know, 30,000 plus years old.

The first thing i- is, i- is it's just astonishing to be in the presence of something that was created by humans so long ago, uh, that, that are so ancient, and y- it's, you immediately start thinking about what were those people like, and how similar or different were they to us? Then you look carefully at the paintings, and the paintings are, they're like something that, you know, I feel we could have painted today or could have been painted today in, in some ways.

I'm thinking about just the level of skill that was involved, the sophisticated use of color, the detail that the artists recorded about, about the animals.

And I guess the first real impression, uh, about the paintings themselves is just h- how sort of honest the depictions are.

Could you talk about that a bit?