This is
the Ardche River
in southern France.
Less than a quarter 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
a 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 by far
the oldest cave paintings,
dating back
some 32,000 years.
In fact, they are the oldest
paintings ever discovered,
more than twice as old
as any other.
In honor of its leading
discoverer, Jean-Marie Chauvet,
the cave now bears the name
Chauvet Cave.
This is the road
in the Ardche Gorge
leading to the cave.
It is early spring.
We have 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,
paleontologists,
and geologists, among others.
They are here to perform
their studies together
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 rock slide,
sealing off the original
entrance to the cave
and creating
a perfect time capsule.
A wooden walkway leads to
the entrance of Chauvet 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, our first exploration
into the cave,
we are using a tiny,
nonprofessional camera rig.
In this first narrow
holding room,
we are fitted
with sterile boots
and given safety instructions.
We have this, okay.
Once you've set this
on the rope,
you don't touch it.
Jean 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 a 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.
In addition,
our time in the cave
has been severely restricted.
And I will take one light
as well.
So it's five past 3:00.
We have one hour.
Apart from time constrictions,
we are not allowed
to touch anything in the cave
or ever step off
the two-foot-wide walkway.
We can use only three
flat cold light panels
powered by battery belts.
- You see how,
when they made the passageways,
they protected
the stalagmites.
It's a nice touch.
Inevitably,
moving along in 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 rock slide,
daylight must have
illuminated this.
- So on the left
when we arrived inside the cave,
you can see the entrance,
and that was
the archaeological entrance.
People came
into the cave level,
not like us, down a ladder.
And then the cliff collapsed.
And then we've got the rubble
from the cliff.
From outside,
you cannot see it.
From inside, you can.
Over there, you've got the dots,
the red dots.
Those are the red dots
which I saw first
when I came into the cave,
big dots made with the palm
of the hand.
Well, here we have... - we have
a big cave bear skull, right?
Male, probably.
And you'll see many others.
You see, in this big chamber,
which is a really huge... -
it's the biggest in the cave... -
there are no paintings
except right at the end.
So this is probably relevant,
because when the entrance
was still open,
there must have been
some light here.
So they put the paintings,
really, in the complete dark.
See here.
This is a cave bear
painted in black.
The paintings
looked so fresh
that there were initial doubts
about their authenticity,
but this picture has a layer
of calcite and concretions
over it
that take 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.
And what is touching
is that it looks as if
it had been done yesterday.
Look how fresh it looks
with that technique.
And here we have,
behind the horse,
there are two mammoths,
big mammoths.
And here you can see
cave bear scratches,
and the cave bear scratches
are not the same color.
They look like
they might have been made
We are coming here to one of
the great spots of the cave,
which is the famous panel
of the horses.
It is of the... - one of the size
of a small recess.
And this small hole there
is where water comes out,
gurgling,
after there's been
something like a week of rain.
And that probably explains
why all those animals
were painted around that hole.
It's one of the great works
of art in the world.
For these Paleolithic 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 artists
painted this bison
with eight 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,
another multilegged animal.
And the rhino to the right
seems also to have
the illusion of movement,
like frames
in an animated film.
The painters of the cave
seem to 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 single millimeter
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 1,300 feet long.
This map is the basis
for all scientific projects
being done here.
- We are working to create
new understanding of the cave
through that precision,
through scientific methods,
but that's not, I think,
the main goal.
The main goal
is to create stories
about what could have happened
in that cave during the past.
It is like
you are creating
the phone directory
of Manhattan.
Four million precise entries,
but do they dream?
Do they cry at night?
What are their hopes?
What are their families?
You'll... - we'll never know
from the phone directory.
- Definitely.
We will never know,
because past is definitely lost.
We will never reconstruct
the past.
We can only create
a representation
of what alre... -
what exists now, today.
You are a human being.
I am a human being.
And here when you come
to that cave,
of course there are some things.
I have my own background.
What is your background,
if I may ask?
- Well, I used to be
a circus man before,
but I switched to archaeology.
Circus?
Doing what?
Lion tamer?
- Well, mostly... -
not lion tamer,
but mostly unicycle
and juggling, yeah.
The first time I entered
to Chauvet Cave,
I had a chance to get in
during five days,
and it was so powerful.
Then every night,
I was dreaming of lions.
And every day was
the same shock for me.
It was an emotional shock.
I mean, I'm a scientist
but a human too.
And after five days, I decided
not to go back in the cave,
because I needed time
just to relax and take time to... -
To absorb it?
- To absorb it, yeah.
Yeah.
And you dreamt
not of paintings of lions
but of real lions.
- Of both, of both, definitely.
Yeah.
And you were afraid
in your dreams?
- I was not afraid, no.
No, no, I was not afraid.
It was more a feeling of
powerful things and deep things,
a way to understand things
which is not a direct way.
- Uh, sorry.
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 heartbeats.
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 melodrame
in this landscape.
It could be straight out
of a Wagner opera
or a painting
of German Romanticists.
Could this be our connection
to them?
This staging of a landscape
as an operatic event
does not belong
to the Romanticists alone.
Stone Age men might have had
a similar sense
of inner landscapes,
and it seems natural
that there's a whole cluster
of Paleolithic caves
right around here.
- The Chauvet Cave is just here
at the top of this cliff,
but the Chauvet Cave
is also associated
to this natural feature,
this beautiful arch
called Pont d'Arc.
Maybe this Pont d'Arc,
in the mythology of the people,
was not only a landmark
but a mark also
in the imagination,
in the stories,
in the mythology
that was important for them
to understand the world.
But what kind
of world was it
for Paleolithic people
back then?
- 35,000 years ago,
the Europe... -
Europe was covered by glaciers,
and in this glacial Europe,
you have to imagine a climate
dry, cold, but with sun also.
That was important.
In this place, for example,
you have to imagine
woolly rhinos,
mammoths along the rivers.
In the forest,
you had Megaloceros deers,
horses, reindeers, bisons,
and also ibex
or the antelopes moving.
So it was very rich.
The biomass
in this part of Europe
was very important
for the development of human
but also carnivores.
So you have to imagine
lions, bears, leopards,
wolves,
foxes in very large numbers.
And among all these carnivores
and predators, human.
Could it be how they
set up fires in Chauvet Cave?
There's evidence that they cast
their own shadows
against the panels of horses,
for example.
- The fire were necessary
to look at the paintings
and maybe towards
staging people around.
When you look with the flame,
with moving light,
you can imagine people dancing
with the shadows.
Like Fred Astaire.
- Fred Astaire, yes.
I think that this image
dancing with this shadow
is a very strong and old images
of human representation,
because the first representation
was the walls,
the white wall
and the black shadow.
The presence of humans
in the cave
was fleeting like shadows.
Bear skulls everywhere,
but these skulls belong
to the cave bear,
a species, like the mammoth
and the woolly 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 calcite 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 ceremonies.
Michel Philipe has studied
the bones of Chauvet Cave.
Caves
constitute a favorable place
for the preservation of bones.
As the result,
there are a lot of bear bones.
Overall, this represents
but there are also some wolves.
We have two skulls
and have several bones.
We have a few ibexes.
We have a magnificent skull
on the wet sand with calcite,
quite lovely.
When you shine light on it,
they are calcite crystals
that glisten.
It's truly quite lovely.
There are some horses as well.
There is a cave hyena.
What else is there?
There's also an eagle skeleton,
a golden eagle,
practically whole,
but it may be
a little more recent,
carried in by the run of water
and wedged against the big rocks
at the edge of the waterway.
So you can see its bones
spread out
over ten feet in length.
Our goal is not only to say
what bones there are,
but 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 a little.
So it could have been the bears
or the hyenas.
All the scientists
are lodged
in a nearby sports complex.
Although they each have
their special field,
they compare and combine
their findings.
We were interested in the work
of these two.
Carole, Gilles, can you explain
about what you're doing here?
- Yeah, oui.
In the cave,
we are trying to reveal
the 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 we put it
on top of the photo.
And then we trace
the underlayers of engravings.
Later, we return to the cave
and check against the contours
all the designs that 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 then a magnificent drawing
of a mammoth done by finger
and other scratches
done over the mammoth.
So their succession
is very important
to understand 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 eight feet
in height,
therefore made with a stick,
followed by the main phase
sometime around 33,000 years
or less.
It starts
with the scraping of the wall
to get to the white of the rock.
After that, the first figures
were put in place.
These were the two rhinos
attacking one another
at the bottom.
After that came
the three bulls.
- And finally, they ended
with a series of horses
going from top to bottom
and, in the final phase,
adding 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 center,
like a circle.
It obviously creates
a very strong dynamic
that is 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 material 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 of animals
overlapping with each other.
The striking point here
is that in cases like this,
after carbon dating,
there are strong indications
that some overlapping figures
were drawn
almost 5,000 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 Paleolithic culture.
Here on the right, she examines
the cluster of palm prints
with her colleague
Valrie Feruglio.
We are currently working
on this large panel
that was covered
with positive handprints.
We've 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 all the way
to his highest palm prints.
This panel is comprised
of the prints of a single man
who must have measured
roughly six feet tall.
A single human.
- 1 meter 80 tall, that's big.
Was it only one person?
- Une personne, une personne.
One person,
a person measuring six feet.
And you'll notice
on these prints
that there is
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 or more ago,
came to the cave before us.
And what is even more surprising
is that you'll find 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.
Madame Baffier
took us on a tour.
She serves as the custodian
of the cave,
and her rules of engagement
are strict
but entirely reasonable
given the precious
and fragile nature
of this unique place.
- You have cave bear tracks,
the forepaws and hind paws.
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 known
in Paleolithic 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... - take a look... -
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
drapery-like concretion
and here a kind of niche
where you can see the traces
of ancient red paintings,
which have been washed away
by water seepage.
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
ocher stripes
that follow
the pendant's contours.
So here we are in front of
the large panel
of red paintings,
also an extremely
intriguing item:
this mound of stones.
You can see that it didn't fall
from the ceiling.
It was prehistoric man
who grouped the stones here,
but we do not know why.
On this panel, you have,
first of all,
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 there are some animals
and here the front part
of a big rhinoceros
with a very large horn.
Here you have
torch swipe marks.
The men would light their way
with a torch,
and when the wood
was too 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
- And here we have a painting
that is quite interesting,
because it represents a couple
of now-extinct cave lions.
You have here the male.
He's behind, the larger one.
He's outlined
in a single stroke
more than six feet in length.
And in front,
you have the female.
She is smaller and seems to rub
her flank against the male.
And this representation
of the cave lion
has allowed us to shed light
on a mystery,
because archaeozoologists
didn't know
whether the cave lion
had a mane,
like the lion today
living in Africa.
And 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.
And this is, without a doubt,
a male,
because we've got 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 keen knowledge
of the animal world.
They tell us stories.
Here you have
an ensemble of horses,
but their open mouths suggest
that the animals are whinnying.
That is to say
that these images
become audible to us.
You see that the two rhinos
there 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
against each other
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.
Look, you can hear
the female growling.
She's raising her lips.
She's baring her teeth.
She is not happy.
And here, to finish off,
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.
Madame Baffier
takes us down
to the farthest 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.
- Unfortunately,
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 marvelous paintings
in the farthest chamber,
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.
That is, you have
her pubic triangle
and her legs that separate,
starting at the knee,
which diverge
and are reminiscent
of the well-known small
early Stone Age statuettes
from archaeological digs
in the Swabian Jura in Germany.
We can only see part of this
lower half of a female body,
because we cannot access
the other side of the pendant.
You can not walk
on these grounds,
because they are too fragile.
You would destroy
the charcoal remains.
You would destroy the tracks
left by the bears
and the humans.
So you'll have to make do
with this partial image.
If you completed the other half
of this female body
with its other legs
symmetrically,
you could see that it is
connected to a bison head
that would have
a somewhat human arm.
And here we are,
some 30,000 years later,
with a myth that has endured
until our days.
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 entire 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.
- All the boxes...
The local museum
is filled
with artifacts from the region.
- Because we have made
some excavation in the site.
But Jean-Michel Geneste
- can only lead us
to a handful of findings
from Chauvet Cave.
- Things are preserved.
You have only two, three boxes
in this area,
but I have prepared
for you some...
To shed light
on the enigmatic female image,
he has prepared some similar
figurines from other regions.
- Very precious for archaeology.
You can see,
like in this Willendorf Venus,
it's a copy made in limestone,
found in Austria,
from the same period.
In the Chauvet Cave,
you have only the lower part
of the belly preserved.
It's embedded in a bison.
There seems
to have existed
a visual convention
extending all the way
beyond Baywatch.
- No male representation
very clearly found
but this lion man.
It comes from a site,
Hohlenstein-Stadel
in Swabian Alps.
What is amazing, it's a mixture
between
an anthropomorphic shape,
a human body,
and the head of a lion.
Is it the spirit of the... -
of a lion in a man?
Is it a marriage?
Is it a new being?
That's a question we can ask
to this reproduction.
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
was connected to this valley
through an ice-free corridor.
It should also be noted that
the Alp Mountains were covered
by 9,000 feet of ice,
binding so much water
that the sea level
was 300 feet 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
would lead you
to the Swabian Alb of Germany.
There, in the museum
of Blaubeuren,
we find replicas of the
best-known Paleolithic Venuses.
But this one, the Venus
of Hohle Fels, stands out.
Found in 2008,
it is sensational for its age.
- The 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.
We can think of the animal
depictions in ivory here
or the fabulous depictions
from Grotte Chauvet
of mammoths, of lions,
and we can see
a very clear connection
between the Swabian finds
and the depictions in Chauvet.
What's also fascinating
is that at this time,
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 here
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,
for instance,
that the figurine has no head,
right?
Instead of a head,
the figurine has a ring.
It was perhaps worn at times,
suspended on a string
of some sort.
Also, 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.
So we're dealing
with the critical phase
in human evolution
where two forms of human beings
are testing their boundaries.
And what we find
over and over again
is that Neanderthals,
although they're
very sophisticated,
they never had this kind
of symbolic artifact ever.
This small ivory mammoth
was also found
near Hohle Fels cave.
And this beautiful horse
comes from the same region.
They also found fragments
of flutes.
We asked Dr. Conard
to show us an original.
- The ivory flute is really
a remarkable artifact
that Maria Malina discovered
a few years back,
and I think
what's extremely important
is that we realize
that archeology today
is not a heroic adventure
with spades and picks
but high-tech scientific work
that's done
with incredible detail.
Really millimeter by millimeter,
the sediments are removed
in these deposits
the age of Grotte Chauvet
and our sites,
between 30,000
and 40,000 years ago.
And this detailed work
allowed Maria
to identify a whole range
of finds
that she was able
to piece together.
Maybe you can explain
how that worked out.
- Yes, we were doing
an inventory
of all the artifact pieces.
Some of the pieces came
from the 1970s,
from the first years
of excavation,
and these were
really small pieces.
You can see here
in this picture.
The tiny ivory pieces
remained unexplained
for a full three decades.
- And 31 pieces had
a very significant look.
We found pieces with a part
of the finger holes
and with notches on the side,
and with these pieces,
I thought already
that it could be
a part of an ivory flute.
Of course, the question
was very important
how this flute was made.
And you can see here
on the long axis
there is a split
going all over the flute,
and inside the two halves,
they hollowed the flute out.
And these little notches
along this axis, along the split
helped to refit these two halves
together very precise.
This flute is only one
of eight in all
so far recovered from this area
of southwestern Germany.
The caves here
have no paintings
but yield many other objects
of art.
- In this cave,
the Geissenkloesterle cave,
many very important findings
from the Ice Age were made.
We found some little ivory
statues of bear and mammoth... -
a very tiny mammoth,
very lovely.
And in 1992, I was part
of the excavation team.
People lived here about 30,000,
and in that time,
it was very cold here,
because the Alp Mountains
were covered by a glacier
about 2,500 meters thick.
And in the valley down there,
reindeer and mammoth
were passing,
and it was very cold.
And that's the reason why
I'm dressed up like an Inuit.
We presume that in this way,
the people of the Ice Age
were clothed
by reindeer fur
and boots made of reindeer fur
and reindeer leather,
because otherwise
you couldn't stand the cold.
One of the most important finds
we made in this cave
was a very tiny flute made
out of the radius of a vulture.
Astonishing on this flute
is that is... -
that it is pentatonic,
and this is the same tonality
we are used to hear today.
And if you like, I'll try to
play some small tunes for you.
And when I first reconstructed
the instrument
and tried to play some tunes,
I came across these ones.
Sounds a little bit
like Star-Spangled 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,
because 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 the cave.
I'm trying to do things
differently,
as I have the habit of using my
sense of smell in my profession.
So I try to sniff the smells
coming from the interior
of a cave.
Here, I didn'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 matter of trying
to experience it
in a different manner.
So I've been... - I've always
created perfumes,
and most notably,
I was president
of the French Society
of Perfumers
for some years and...
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 re-creation
of the odor
of the prehistoric interior.
- Evidently, the odor
you can smell right now
is quite attenuated.
It is very subtle.
There are not many emanations,
but our imagination permits us
to try and reconstruct
the scene,
the scene with its odors
from 25,000 years ago,
with all the animals that
would have been found there... -
bears, wolves, perhaps even
rhinoceroses, and man... -
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.
Herzog:
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 landslide
sealed the entrance.
In a forbidden recess
of the cave,
there's a footprint
of an eight-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
thousands of years apart?
We'll never know.
Dwarfed
by these large chambers
illuminated
by our wandering lights,
sometimes we were overcome by
a strange, irrational sensation
as if we were disturbing
the Paleolithic people
in their work.
It felt like eyes upon us.
This sensation occurred
to some of the scientists
and also the discoverers
of the cave.
It was a relief to surface
again aboveground.
Back outside,
we ask Jean-Michel Geneste
about hunting techniques
of Paleolithic people
millennia before the invention
of bow and arrow.
- The Ohauvet Oave
Aurignacian people
hunted a lot
of really big games.
They hunted everywhere
in France and Europe.
In the settlement,
we found a lot of bones
of reindeer, bison, horses,
and sometime mammoths.
So they developed very specific
hunting technology.
For example, the system
of the Aurignacian bone point
is very ingenious.
It's a bone point
on a wooden shaft.
The piece of the bone point
is very strongly associated
to the shaft.
It's a system using a fork
and a piece inside.
So it's very strong.
It has been made and developed
to kill bison or horses
like that.
It's very aggressive,
and it's also very strong
and powerful.
This kind of weapon and spear
were thrown
not only by hand, like that,
because it's not very efficient,
but l... - we suspect that very... -
in the beginning
of the Paleolithic,
they developed the technology
of the spear thrower.
A spear thrower, it's at
the beginning only a hook,
sometime a tooth,
a piece of antler,
like this one,
on a long handle.
It's elongated arm gave
a lot of power, like that,
and also at the same time,
some precision to keep... -
I just... - to give the spear
a good direction.
So I will show you.
Yes.
You see, the spear
with a flint point,
but to use this,
it's necessary to have
a small depression
at the back of the spear.
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?