Saturday, June 11, 2011

Cave Paintings

Evan and I saw Werner Herzog's "Cave of Forgotten Dreams" in 3D earlier this week. It has me thinking a lot about the nature of humans. Werner Herzog is kind of hilarious in that he earnestly and honestly sets out to understand the human condition with each documentary he makes - all in a heavy German accent. He is one of Evan's heroes so I am obliged to give him a chance, and I am glad that I have.

Herzog was given special, albeit limited access to film the Chauvet Cave by the French government. Discovered in the early 1990s, these are the oldest cave paintings to ever be found. This film gives some history, musings and interviews from the scientists, archaeologists and art historians, but mostly because it is shot in 3D, it sets out to give the audience the experience of walking in the cave - a sojourn most of us should not and will not ever make. (A nearby cave painting was opened up to the public and subsequently grew mold on the paintings because of the tourists' breath.)



One of the things that struck me most about this is first - how old we are as a species. The oldest paintings in that cave were made 32,000 years ago. Some of the newer paintings in the cave were made about 5,000 years later. Think about that. That is the entire space of written human history - doing the same exact thing they did 5,000 years before.

One of the French archeologists was asked by Herzog what he thought it meant to him to be human, to be a homo sopien, especially when these early caver painters existed at the same time as Neanderthals. To paraphrase, the archeologist said, "Sapien means to know. We do not know. We are homo spiritual. We want to know. That is what defines us."

Another archeologists, Jean Clottes, expands on this idea in the New Yorker article that inspired Herzog to make the film in the first place.

“You can advance a scientific hypothesis without claiming certainty,” Clottes told me one evening. “Everyone agrees that the paintings are, in some way, religious. I’m not a believer myself, and I’m certainly not a mystic. But Homo sapiens is Homo spiritualis. The ability to make tools defines us less than the need to create belief systems that influence nature. And shamanism is the most prevalent belief system of hunter-gatherers.”