Original subtitles

Cave.Of.Forgotten.Dreams.2010.1080p.BrRip.x264.YIFY

This is the Ard�che 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 Ard�che 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

5,000, 10,000 years earlier.

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 99% of the finds,

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 Val�rie 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 28,000 years ago.

- 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 30,000, 40,000 years ago

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,

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 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, 40,000 years back in time,

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 9,000 feet thick.

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?

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