This is the Ardèche River in Southern France.
Less than a ¼ of a mile from here
three explorers set out a few days before Christmas in 1994.
They came along this way.
They were seeking drafts of air emanating from the ground -
which would point to the presence of caves.
Eventually they sensed the subtle airflow
and began clearing away rocks,
revealing a narrow shaft into the cliff.
It was so narrow that a person could barely squeeze through it.
They descended into the unknown.
They were about to make one of the greatest discoveries
in the history of human culture.
At first, the cave did not appear to contain anything special,
aside from being particularly beautiful.
But then, deep inside, they found this.
It would turn out that this cave was pristine.
It had been perfectly sealed for tens of thousands of years.
It contained cave paintings dating back 32,000 years.
In fact, they are the oldest paintings ever discovered.
More than twice as old as any other.
In honour of its leading discoverer, Jean-Marie Chauvet,
the cave now bears the name Chauvet Cave.
This is road in the Ardèche Gorge, leading to the cave.
It is early spring.
We've been given an unprecedented endorsement
by the French Ministry of Culture to film inside the cave.
From the first day of its discovery
the importance of the cave was immediately recognized
and access was shut off categorically.
Only a small group of scientists is allowed to enter.
They are archaeologists, art historians, palaeontologists
and geologists among others.
They are here to perform their studies
during a few short weeks at the end of March
and the beginning of April.
This is one of the rare times anyone
with the exception of two guards
is allowed inside the cave.
The cave is like a frozen flash of a moment in time.
The reason for its pristine condition is this rock face.
Some 20,000 years ago,
it came tumbling down in a massive rockslide,
sealing off the original entrance to the cave,
creating a perfect time capsule.
A wooden walkway leads to the entrance of the cave.
The narrow tunnel, through which the discoverers crawled,
has been widened and locked with a massive steel door,
like a bank vault.
Once we pass through this door
it will be locked behind us,
so as not to compromise the delicate climate inside.
For this first exploration into the cave,
we are using a tiny, non-professional camera rig.
In this narrow holding room,
we are fitted with sterile boots and given safety instructions.
- We have this. - Good.
Once you've set this on the rock, you don't touch it.
Clottes was the first scientist to inspect the cave
a few days after its discovery.
For five years, until his retirement,
he served as head of the scientific team.
Our guide leads us down the first sloping tunnel,
which ends in a vertical drop to the cave floor.
Since our film crew has been limited to a maximum of four,
we must all perform technical tasks.
Our time in the cave has been severely restricted.
I will take one light as well.
So it's 3.05.
We have one hour.
Apart from time contrictions, we're not allowed to touch anything.
Or ever step off the 2 ft wide walkway.
We can use only 3 flat light pannels,
powered by battery belts.
When they made the passageways, they protected the stalagmites.
It's a nice touch.
Moving along in a single file
the film crew will have no hiding places
to get out of the shot.
The first large chamber we come to
is the original entrance to the cave.
In prehistoric times, before the rockslide,
daylight must have illuminated this.
On the left, right inside the cave,
you could see the entrance.
The archaeological entrance.
People came into the cave, level.
Not like us down a ladder.
The cliff collapsed.
Then we've got the rubble from the cliff.
From outside you can't see it, from the inside you can.
Over there you have the dots.
The red dots.
Those are the ones I first saw when I came to the cave.
Big dots made with the palm of a hand.
Here we have a big cave bear skull.
Male, probably.
You'll see many others.
In this big chamber, which is really huge,
the biggest in the cave,
there are no paintings, except right at the end.
This is probably relevant. When the entrance was still open,
there must have been some light here.
Or they would have been painting in complete darkness.
This is a cave bear painted in black.
The paintings look so fresh
that there were initial doubts about their authenticity.
But this picture has a layer of calcite and concretions over it
that takes thousands of years to grow.
This was the first proof that it was not a forgery.
A beautiful horse here, one of the most beautiful in the cave.
It looks like it could have been made yesterday.
See how fresh it looks!
Here, behind the horse, are two mammals. Big mammals.
Here you can see cave bear scratches.
These scratches do not have the same colour.
They might have been made 5-10,000 years earlier.
Here's one of the great spots in the cave,
the famous Panel of the Horses.
It has the size of a small recess
and through that hole there water comes out,
gurgling after a week of rain.
That may explain why the animals were painted around that hole.
It's one of the great works of art in the world.
For these palaeolithic painters,
the play of light and shadows from their torches
could possibly have looked something like this.
For them the animals perhaps appeared moving, living.
We should note that the artist painted this bison with 8 legs,
suggesting movement, almost a form of proto-cinema.
The walls themselves are not flat,
but have their own three-dimensional dynamic,
their own movement, which was utilized by the artists.
In the upper left corner is another multi-legged animal.
The rhino to the right seems also to have the illusion of movement.
Like frames in an animated film.
The painters speak to us from a familiar, yet distant universe.
But what we are seeing here is part of millions of spatial points.
Today, scientists have mapped every millimetre of the cave,
using laser scanners.
The position of every feature in the cave is known.
This is the shape of the cave in its entirety.
From end to end, it is about 1300 ft long.
This map is the basis for all scientific projects here.
We are working to create a new understanding of the cave.
Through precision, scientific methods.
But that's not the main goal.
The main goal is to create stories
about what could have happened in that cave in the past.
It is like you're creating the film directory of Manhattan.
4 million precise entries, but do they dream or cry at night?
What are their hopes? What are their families?
You will never know from the film directory.
We'll definitely never know because the past is lost.
We will never reconstruct the past.
We can only create a representation of what exists now, today.
You're a human being, I'm a human being.
When you come to the cave, of course there are some things...
I have my own background...
What is your background?
I used to be a circus man, but switched to archaeology.
Circus? Doing what? Lion tamer?
Well, not a lion tamer. Mostly unit cycles and juggling.
When I first entered the cave, I had a chance to stay five days.
It was so powerful. Every night I dreamt of lions.
Every day was the same shock for me.
It was an emotional shock.
I'm a scientist, and a human too.
After 5 days, I decided not to go back to the cave.
I needed time to just relax ...and to absorb it.
You dreamt not of paintings of lions, but of real lions?
Both. Definitely.
And you were afraid in your dreams?
I was not afraid, no, it was more...
A feeling of something powerful and deep.
A way of understanding that was not direct.
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 hearts beat.
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 melodrama in this landscape.
It could be straight out of a Wagner opera.
Or a painting by German romanticists.
Could this be our connection to them?
This staging of the landscape is an operatic event.
It does not belong to the romanticists alone.
Stoneage men may have had a smilar sense of inner landscapes.
It seems natural that there is a cluster of palaeolithic caves
right around here.
The Chauvet Cave is right here at the top of this cliff.
The cave is also associated with this natural feature.
This beautiful arch called Pont d'Arc.
Maybe the Pont d'Arc, in the mythology of the people,
was not only a landmark,
but a mark in their imagination and their stories and mythology.
An important way for them to understand the world.
But what kind of world was it for palaeolithic people?
35,000 years ago, Europe was covered by glaciers.
In this glacial Europe, you must imagine a dry climate.
Cold, but with sun, that is important.
In this place, you have to imagine rhinos along the rivers.
In the forest you had megaloceros deer.
Horses, raindeer, bisons, and antelopes.
It was very rich.
The biomass in this part of Europe was very important
for the development of humans,
but also for carnivores.
So imagine lions, bears, leopards, wolfs, foxes...
in very large numbers.
And among all these carnivores and predators - humans.
Does the way they set up fires in the Chauvet Cave
offer evidence that they cast their own shadows
against the paintings of horses for example?
The fires were necessary for looking at the paintings.
And maybe for staging people around them.
With the flames and moving light you can imagine people dancing.
Fred Astaire!
The image of him dancing with his shadows
is a very strong image of human representation.
A representation of a white wall and a black shadow.
The presence of humans in the cave was fleeting like shadows.
Bear skulls everywhere.
These skulls belonged to the cave bear.
A species like the mammoth and the wooly 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 calcide 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 for ceremonies.
Michel Philippe has studied the bones of the Chauvet Cave.
Caves constitute a favourable place for the preservation of bones.
There are many bear bones, 99 percent of the finds.
There are also some wolves, two skulls and several bones.
We have a few ibexes
with magnificent skulls in the wet sand with calcide.
Quite lovely.
When you shine light on it, calcite crystals glisten.
There are some horses as well.
There's a cave hyena.
There's also an eagle skeleton.
A golden eagle.
Practically whole, but it may be a little more recent,
carried in by water and wedged against the big rocks.
So, it's bones are spread out over ten ft in length.
Our goal is not only to say what bones there are.
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,
so it could have been the bears or the hyenas.
All the scientists are lodged in a neaby sports complex.
Although they all have their special fields,
they compare and combine their findings.
We were interested in the work of these two.
Carol and Giles, can you explain what you are doing here?
In the cave, we are trying to reveal 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 put it on top of the photo.
Then we trace the underlayer of engravings.
Later, we return to the cave.
We check against the contours all the designs 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 a magnificent drawing of a mammoth done by finger,
and other scratches done over the mammoth.
Their succession is important for understanding what took place.
On the computer one can see three phases.
The first dates 40,000 years back in time.
The one when the bear scratched the walls.
Then a second phase
with drawings stretching over 8 ft in height.
Therefore made with a stick.
Followed by the main phase
some time around 33,000 years ago or less.
It starts with the scraping of the wall
to get to the wide of the rock.
After that the first figures were put in place.
The two rhinos attacking one another at the bottom.
After that came the three bulls.
Finally, it ended with a series of horses
going from top to bottom.
And in the final phase, I did this very beautiful horse
that confronts the viewers when they arrive in the cave.
When you do a synthesis of the composition,
there is a kind of dynamic, circular movement
going from the bottom to the right,
towards the centre like a circle.
It obviously creates a very strong dynamic
reinforced here by the oblique movement of the horses.
It's the force of the contrast,
the fact that they've played with the contrast
and with the shape of the wall.
It's like an easel. They've used the surface,
made use of the material, and mixed materials
to create this very strong impression.
By comparing all the paintings in the cave
it seems certain that the horses of this panel
were created by one single individual.
But in the immediate vicinity of the horses,
there are figures with animals overlapping with each other.
A striking point here is that, in cases like this,
after carbon-dating, there are strong indications
that some overlapping figures
were drawn almost 5000 years apart.
The sequence and duration of time is unimaginable for us today.
We are locked in history, and they were not.
Despite this blurring of time, and the anonymity of the artists,
there's one individual who can be singled out.
Dominique Baffier is a scholar of palaeolithic culture.
Here on the right, she examines the cluster of palm prints
with her colleague Valérie Feruglio.
We are currently working on this large panel
that was covered with positive handprints.
Weve been able to put forward as evidence
the number of positions the individual assumed,
and his movements.
He started by crouching,
and then he stretched out to reach to his highest palm prints.
This panel is comprised of the prints of a single man
who must have measured roughly 6 ft tall.
A single human.
One 1.80 m tall.
That's big.
- Only one person? - One person!
A person measuring 6 ft.
You'll notice on these prints a very significant detail.
He has a slightly crooked little finger.
And that's extraordinary, because it gives a physical reality
to a prehistoric individual who 32,000 years ago
came to the cave before us.
Even more surprising are traces of him deeper in the cavern.
We'll be able to recognize him by his crooked little finger.
Because he printed his hand farther in the cave.
So we can follow this man's path.
Mme Baffier took us on a tour.
She serves as a custodian of the cave.
Her rules of engagament are strict, but entirely reasonable,
given the precious and fragile nature of this unique place.
You have cave bear tracks.
The forepaws and hindpaws.
These are the longest cave bear tracks
currently known in any cave.
It's very sparkly, there are crystals that glitter.
Here at this junction we have the panel of the panther.
You can see the drawing of a panther,
which is the only one know in palaeolothic wall painting to date.
Here we've arrived at a place
where concretion growth has been very important.
On the ground and walls,
you can see that rimstone calcite ridges
have covered everything in sparkling formation.
A kind of cascade.
With waves.
Here you have a bear vertebra,
which is entirely coated in calcite,
and held by calcite crystals.
In front of us, on the wall
you also have an overflowing draperylike concretion.
And here a kind of niche
where you can see the traces of ancient red paintings,
which have been washed away by water sievage.
And this is where you find extremely original images.
Like this insect-shaped one.
Or this one, shaped like a butterfly.
Or a bird in flight...
that you also find on this rock pendant,
hanging from the ceiling.
Large and very small.
Coupled with two vertical ochre stripes
that follow the pendant's contours.
Here we are in front of the large panel of red paintings.
Also an extremely intriguing item.
This mount of stones didn't fall from the ceiling.
It was prehistoric man who brought the stones here.
But we do not know why.
On this panel you have a little rhinoceros
with a large horn and a stripe on the abdomen.
Also, you have a whole series underneath
of positive handprints.
And over there you can see the hand of the man
who printed his palms in the first room of the cave.
Because you can recognize his crooked little finger.
In other words, we've followed him here.
Here are some animals, and here the front of a big rhinoceros
with a very large horn.
Here you have torch white marks.
The men would light their way with a torch.
And when the wood was burnt down,
they would scrape the torch against the wall
to rekindle the flame.
The traces are fresh.
Because you can see these small fragments of coal that have fallen.
One of these tiny fragments was tested by radiocarbon dating.
This torch was swiped 28,000 years ago.
Here we have a painting that is quite interesting.
Bacause it represents a couple of now extinct cave lions.
Here is the male. He is behind, the larger one.
He's outlined in a single stroke, more than six ft in length.
In front you have the female.
She is smaller and seems to rub her flank against the male.
This representation of the cave lion
has allowed us to shed light on a mystery,
because archaeo-zoologists didn't know if the cave lion had a mane
like the lion today, living in Africa.
This representation of a cave lion, more than 30,000 years old,
shows us that they didn't have a mane.
Look at the outline of his head, which is clearly delineated.
This is wihout a doubt a male,
because we have the scrotum right here under the tail.
This is one of the most beautiful panels in the cave.
Along with the lion panel at the far end.
And here we can see the technique of prehistoric man.
But you can also see their key knowledge of the animal world.
They tell us stories.
Here you have an ensemble of horses.
But their open mouths suggest the animals are whinnying.
That is to say that these images become audible to us.
You see that the two rhinos are fighting.
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 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.
You can hear the female growling.
She's raising her lips, she's baring her teeth.
She is not happy.
And here 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.
Mme Baffier takes us down to the fartherst 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.
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 marvellous paintings.
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.
You have her pubic triangle,
and her legs that seperate, starting at the knee,
which diverge
and are reminiscent of the well-known stoneage statuettes
from archaeological digs in the Swabian Jura in Germany.
We can only see part of this lower half of this female body,
because we cannot access the other side of the pendant.
You cannot walk on these grounds,
because they are too fragile.
Your would destroy the charcoal remains.
You would destroy the tracks left by the bears and the humans.
You'll have to make do with this partial image.
If you completed the other half of this female body
with its other legs symetrically,
you could see that it is connected to a bison head
that would have a somewhat human arm.
Here we are some 30,000 years later
with a myth that has endured until our day.
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 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.
The local museum is filled with artefacts from the region.
We have made excavations on the site...
Jean Michel Geneste can only lead us to a handful of findings
from the Chauvet Cave.
We have only2-3 boxes in this area.
To shed light on the enigmatic female image,
he has prepared similar figurines from other regions.
You can see the likeness in this Willendorf Venus.
It's a copy made in limestone,
found in Austria from the same period.
In Chauvet, only the lower part of the belly is preserved.
It's embedded in a bison.
There seems to have existed a visual convention
extending all the way beyond Baywatch.
No clear male representation has been found,
but this lion man comes from a site in the Swabian Alps.
It's an amazing mixture of an anthropomorphic shape,
a human body, and the head of a lion.
Is is the spirit of a lion in a man?
Is it a composed creature, a new being?
Such equations can be pondered.
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 30-40,000 years ago
was connected to this valley through an icefree corridor.
It should also be noted
that the Alp Mountains were covered by 9000 ft of ice,
binding so much water
that the sea level was 300 ft 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
woud lead you to the Swabian Alps in Germany.
In the museum of Blaubeuren,
are replicas of the best-known palaeolithic Venuses.
But this one, the Venus of Hohle Fels, stands out.
Found in 2008, it is sensational for its age.
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.
The animal depictions in ivory here.
Or the fabulous depictions from Grotte Chauvet
of mammoths and lions.
We can see a very clear connection
between the Swabian finds and the depictions in Chauvet.
It's also fascinating that, at this time 40,000 years ago,
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 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 that the figurine has no head.
Instead of a head, the figurine has a ring.
It was perhaps worn at times, suspended on a string.
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.
We're dealing with the critical phase in human evolution
where two forms of humans are testing their boundaries.
What we find, over and over again,
is that Neanderthals, although very sophisticated,
never have this kind of symbolic artefact.
Ever.
This small ivory mammoth was also found near Hohle Fels Cave.
This beautiful horse comes from the same rigion.
They also found fragments of flutes.
We asked Dr Conrad to show us an original.
The ivory flute is a remarkable artefact
that Maria Malina discovered a few years back.
It's extremely important that we realize that archaeology today
is not a heroic adventure with spades and picks,
but high-tech scientific work that's done with indredible detail.
Millimetre by millimetre the sediments are removed
in these deposits in Chauvet between 30-40,000 years ago.
This detailed work allowed Maria to identify a whole range of finds,
which she was able to piece together.
You can explain how that worked out.
We did an inventory of all the artefact pieces.
Some of the pieces came from the 70's,
from the first years of excavation.
They were really small pieces, which you can see in this picture.
The tiny ivory pieces remained unexplained for three decades.
31 pieces had a very significant look.
We found pieces with a part of the finger holes
and with notches on the side.
I thought that these pieces could be part of an ivory flute.
An important question was how the flute was made.
You can see, on the long axis, a split running along the flute.
Inside the two halfs, they'd hollowed out the flute.
These little notches along the axis, along this split,
helped to refit the two halves together very precisely.
This flute is only one of eight recovered from SW Germany.
The caves here have no paintings,
but yield many other objects of art.
In this cave, the Geißenklösterle Cave,
many important findings from the Ice Age were made.
We found small ivory statues of bears and mammoths.
Very tiny mammoths, very lovely.
In 1992, I was part of the excavation team.
People lived here 30-40,000 years back in time.
At that time, it was very cold here,
because the Alp Mountains were covered by a glacier
about 2500 metres thick.
In the valley down there, raindeer and mammoths roamed.
It was very cold.
That's why I'm dressed up like an Inuit.
We presume that Ice Age people were clothed this way.
In raindeer fur, and in boots made of raindeer fur
and raindeer leather.
Otherwise you couldn't stand the cold.
One of the most important finds
we made in this cave
was a tiny flute made out of the radius of a vulture.
An astonishing fact is that it's pentatonic.
The same tonality we're used to hearing today.
If you like, I'll try to play a tune for you.
I reconstructed the instrument, tried to play some tunes
and came across this one.
Sounds a bit like Stars Bangled Banner.
Back in France, near Chauvet Cave,
explorers using more primal techniques
in search of still hidden underground chambers,
roam the landscape.
Professional cave explorers
have techniques for finding underground chambers.
There are air currents, so they use the back of their hands
or their cheeks, to feel for a faint draft of air
that may be coming out of a cave.
I'm trying to do things differently.
I have the habit of using my sense of smell in my profession.
I sniff the smells coming from the interior of the cave.
Here I couldn't smell anything except the exterior landscape.
Outside you can smell the earth, the wild thyme,
the ivy...
You can smell a range of things,
but nothing specific related to a cavern
that's been closed for thousands of years.
This is my personal technique, because I design perfumes.
It's a way to experience it in a different manner.
I have always created perfumes.
I was the president of the French society of perfumers
for some years.
There are plans to build a theme park for tourists
with a precise replica of the cave a few miles from here.
This replica may even contain
a recreation of the odor of the prehistoric interior.
Evidently, the odor you can smell right now is quite attenuated.
It's very subtle.
There are not many emanations,
but our imagination permits us to try to reconstruct the scene.
The scene with its odors from 25,000 years ago
with all the animals that would have been there.
Bears, wolves, perhaps even rhinoceroses and men.
The presence of their lives, meaning burnt wood, resins,
the odors of everything from the natural world
that surrounds this cave.
We can go back with our imagination.
With his sense of wonder, the cave transforms
into an enchanted world of the imaginary
where time and space lose their meaning.
These crystal formations take thousands of years to grow.
The artists of the cave never even saw them,
as many of them only started to form
after the landslides sealed the entrance.
In a forbidden recess of the cave,
there's a footprint of an 8-year-old boy
next to the footprint of a wolf.
Did a hungry wolf stalk the boy?
Or did they walk together as friends?
Or were their tracks made thousand years apart?
We'll never know.
Dwarfed by these large chambers,
illuminated by all the wandering lights,
sometimes we were overcome by a strange, irrational sensation.
As if we were disturbing the palaeolithic people in their work.
It felt like eyes upon us.
This sensation occured to some of the scientists,
and also the discoverers of the cave.
It was a relief to surface again above ground.
Back outside, we asked Jean Michel Geneste
about hunting techniques of palaeolithic people.
Millennia before the invention of bow and arrow.
The original Chauvet Cave people had a lots of large game.
They hunted everywhere in France and Europe.
In their settlements we found a lot of bones
of reindeer, bison, horses, and sometimes mammoths.
They had developed very special hunting techniques.
The original spearpoint system is very ingenious.
It's a spearpoint on a wooden shaft.
The spearpoint is tied firmly to the shaft.
The system uses a fork with a piece inside.
So it's very strong.
It was developed and made to kill bison or horses like that.
It's very aggressive, strong, and powerful.
This kind of weapon was thrown not only by hand,
because it wasn't very effective.
We suspect that in the beginning of the Upper Palaeolithic
they developed a spear throwing technique.
At the tip, the spear thrower is provided with a hook, a tooth.
The elongated handle gives the spear a lot of power.
It increases precision and targeting accuracy.
I will show you.
You see the spear with the flint point.
There must be a small depression at the back of the spear.
We suspect they sometimes used feathers to maintain direction.
I will try to show you how to kill a horse.
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.
It flies 30 metres in a straight line.
The palaeolithic men were better than you, I guess.
It could be difficult for me to kill a horse with this.
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, 4 hrs a day.
The famous cave of Lascaux had to be shut down,
because the breath of scores of tourists
has caused mould 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 the stick with which we reached out.
The bison seems to embrace the sex of a naked woman.
Traditional people, and they think, people of the Palaeolithic,
probably had two concepts that changed our view of the world.
The concepts of fluidity and permeability.
Fluidity means that the categories we have,
man, woman, horse, tree etc., can shift.
A tree can 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 between the world where we are
and the world of the spirits.
A wall can talk to us, or accept us, or refuse us.
A shaman can send his spirit to the world of the supernatural.
Or he can receive visiting supernatural spirits.
If you put the two concepts together,
you realize how different life must have been
from the way we live now.
Humans have been described in many ways.
For a while, it was homo sapiens and it still is 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 say Homo Spiritualis.
The strongest hint of something spiritual,
some spiritual 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.
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 out of the cave.
You must start from the cave and then go outside.
How far outside? Where would you go?
I would say everywhere...
A look at the different cultures would be a good way
to better understand how different cultures
could have coped with rock art.
In Australia, in North America, or in South Africa.
Aboriginees in Australia, who lived until recently
almost like Stoneage people.
They used to paint and create rock art
until the 1970s.
In some places, I think there still are traditions
of creating rock art.
Of course, it has changed since the beginning of the century
when they were discovered.
It can show us different ways of looking at rock art,
that are not our way of looking at rock art.
Do you have an example?
In Northern Australia in the 1970s,
an ethnographer was in the field with an Aboriginee
who was his informer.
Once they came to a rock shelter that contained beautiful paintings,
but they were decaying.
The Aboriginees became sad
when they saw the paintings decaying.
In that region, there is a tradition of touching up the paintings.
Time after time.
So, he sat down and started to touch up the paintings.
The ethnographer asked the question all Westerners would ask,
"Why are you painting?"
The man answered, and his answer was troubling,
because he answered, "I am not painting."
"It's the hand of a spirit that is actually painting now."
The hand of a spirit?
The man is a part of the spirit.
Do you think the paintings in Chauvet Cave
were somehow the beginning of the modern human soul?
What constitutes humanness?
Humanness is the ability to adapt to the world.
Man needs to adapt to the landscape and to other beings,
animals and human groups.
And to communicate.
To communicate by inscribing memories on specific, odd things
like walls, pieces of wood...
An invention made by the Cromagnon.
How about music?
Yes, songs, mythology, music.
The invention of the figurative representation
of animals, of man, of things
is a way for humans to communicate with the future.
A way of evoking the past and transmitting information
by means better than language.
Signs instead of oral communication.
This invention still holds in our world today.
This camera for example.
On the Rhône 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 that was 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 reactor water, man, do they thrive!
There are already hundreds of them.
Not surprisingly, albinos swim and breathe in these waters.
A thought is born in this surreal environment.
Not long ago, a few ten thousand years back,
there were glasiers here, 9000 ft thick.
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
if these creatures are dividing into their own doppelgängers.
And do they really meet,
or is it just their own imaginary mirror reflection?
Are we possibly the crocodiles who look back
into an abyss of time,
when we see the paintings of Chauvet Cave?
English subtitles by: SuBVersion