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01:01I am on a journey back through time.
01:08The first stage of the journey revealed that architecture, medicine and writing, the benchmarks
01:14of civilisation which we attribute to the Egyptians, have their roots deep in an earlier
01:19Neolithic age of great building, of which Stonehenge is perhaps the best known example.
01:29A solar temple, astronomical observatory, a Neolithic clock or calendar.
01:39Many theories have been put forward to try and explain the riddle of these stones.
01:45But we can be sure of one thing.
01:47To build Stonehenge would not have been easy.
01:51It would have required advanced technologies, social organisation, understanding of the environment
01:57and of the sun and the moon, trading links, artistic skills, complex religious and cultural beliefs.
02:05None of this happened overnight, so where did all this knowledge come from?
02:12It was once thought that Stonehenge was a poor man's pyramid, built by the simple folk of Britain
02:18in imitation of their elders and betters that lived on the banks of the Nile.
02:23A distant outpost echoing the glories of Egyptian civilisation.
02:31But it isn't the architectural and astronomical legacy of the pharaohs we see embodied here at Stonehenge.
02:37Rather, it's the concrete expression of knowledge that had been native to northwestern Europe
02:42for over 20,000 years.
02:45The time we've come to know as the Ice Age.
02:54This is the second stage of my journey, back into the Upper Paleolithic period in Europe.
03:00The time of cave paintings and woolly mammoths.
03:04The time before settled village life, before agriculture, before stone buildings.
03:10A span of 30,000 years in which people were hunters and saw no need to change this lifestyle
03:17as they adapted to the repeated freeze and thaw of the environment.
03:37Vast sheets of ice covered up to 30% of the earth.
03:41The temperature, even in summer, never rising high enough to melt the huge wall of ice and snow
03:46which stretched across the continents.
03:51Vegetation was scarce.
03:53Few animals were able to survive.
03:55Many were made extinct by successive invasions of ice.
04:02I've come to Finland.
04:04Today it is only on the edge of the polar ice cap that we can understand the conditions
04:09which prevailed at that time.
04:20In this harsh environment, bands of nomadic hunters survive for 30,000 years, moving with
04:27the seasons, following nature's rhythm.
04:33History writes off these people as primitive because they show no conventional signs of progress
04:38or civilisation throughout this vast swathe of time.
04:44They left no stone monuments, built no towns, and had few possessions.
04:55But what these ice age hunters did leave was a trail of clues which reveals them to be our
05:01social and intellectual equals.
05:08Between 10,000 and 40,000 years ago, during the period known to archaeologists as the upper
05:14paleolithic, ice age people roamed landscapes as immense and as barren as this.
05:20Now, it strikes me, they must have been very ingenious because how else could they have survived?
05:26If they weren't knowledgeable, they'd be dead.
05:33If, as I believe, these hunters were capable of building something like Stonehenge, then
05:38there are a number of prerequisites.
05:41They would need a knowledge of the environment, the sun, the moon and the seasons.
05:47They would need the ability to invent the right tools.
05:51They would need to know how to survive, whatever the weather could throw at them.
05:56They must have been intelligent.
06:02The trail takes us from the furthest reaches of Finland, south to the place that our ice age
06:08ancestors called home.
06:12The foothills of the Pyrenees in southern France.
06:2030,000 years ago, this was the land of the hunter.
06:33Man has been a hunter for countless millennia.
06:38In the course of innumerable chases, he learned to reconstruct the behaviour of his prey, from
06:44tracks on the ground, broken branches, excrement, tufts of hair and feathers.
06:57He learned to sniff out, record, interpret and classify traces as subtle as saliva.
07:05He learned how to execute complex mental operations with lightning speed.
07:20The art of tracking, of hunting, is the basis of all deductive and scientific reasoning.
07:28Today, detectives and even scientists draw on techniques first used by the ancient hunters.
07:34They are all engaged, like me, in the process of interpreting the clues,
07:39recognising the right bits of information and piecing together the evidence.
07:45From the prehistoric reading of animal footprints, to the technique of genetic fingerprinting,
07:51is a trail that links the human mind from ice age to information age.
08:06I'm convinced that the prejudice against our prehistoric forebears
08:10is because today we see hunting as somehow mindless, savage and animalistic.
08:19Our impression of a band of simple hunters wandering aimlessly across an inhospitable landscape,
08:25is the stuff of myth and misinformation.
08:32There was nothing simple about these hunters,
08:35nor was there anything random about their journeys or where they chose to live.
08:41This vast river tunnel, called the Mazdazil,
08:45is known by archaeologists as a super site,
08:48because of the huge number of artefacts recovered from it.
08:53Evidence that people returned here again and again.
08:56Evidence of a community.
09:07I think you only have to look at the Mazdazil,
09:10even today it takes our breath away as we come around the corner and see it,
09:13so to Paleolithic people it must have had an incredible impact.
09:17And just from its sheer size,
09:19I think it must have played a great role in the mythology, the system of beliefs.
09:24It is the greatest shelter of the entire region.
09:28It's still one of the most important Ice Age sites in the whole of Europe.
09:31And is the fact that it's right by the river, is that an important thing?
09:35Certainly. I mean, the rivers were a key factor in all of Ice Age life.
09:40The whole area, these Pyrenean foothills, is very rich in game during the Ice Age.
09:45And while the rivers were teeming with fish,
09:47this was an ideal place in which to come together.
09:49At this time, people obviously weren't living in villages like, say, the Neolithic people were,
09:54but were they just moving aimlessly around in the landscape?
09:58They were moving around a lot, we know that,
10:00but I certainly don't think it was aimless in any way.
10:03They will have been living in communities maybe of 20, 25 people.
10:07But I'm sure that they must have come together,
10:09whole collections of these communities must have come together,
10:12if not every year, then every few years,
10:14in places like the Mazdazil, the super sites,
10:18in order to trade, to barter, to meet potential mates,
10:22to play, to have a big get-together, to have a good time.
10:35Once we have a clear picture of Ice Age hunters as intelligent, resourceful people,
10:41with forethought, purpose and an understanding of the environment,
10:45we can begin to see them as the forerunners of the people that built Stonehenge.
11:00Throughout the Pyrenees, there are many sites like the Mazdazil,
11:04that show that hunters didn't live in isolated communities.
11:08They would get together with other groups,
11:10not only to exchange gossip and gifts, but also ideas.
11:29Palaeolithic man's great talent was to improve on what nature gave him.
11:38Palaeolithic man's great talent was to improve on what nature gave him.
11:48The invention of the spear-thrower transformed the hunt.
11:52We have here a spear-thrower.
11:54A lot of these have bone or antler part, so you can use different woods, anything,
12:01and then you just hook it.
12:03It goes in the gorge here and just gets armed, and then you throw.
12:08So, with the spear-thrower, does it improve the speed or the precision,
12:14the distance you can get, or the power?
12:17I'd say all of that, all of that, because it helps.
12:20So it's like having another joint on your arm.
12:22Yeah, another joint on your arm, and that represents almost the length of your arm.
12:26So it's basically a very sophisticated technology designed for a lifestyle of hunting and gathering.
12:32Okay, maybe we should throw this way in case you kill someone.
12:35And then you just aim and shoot.
12:40That's a good one.
12:40Want to try?
12:41Yeah, sure.
12:43This one is lighter, actually.
12:45Maybe it's easier to use.
12:47That's it.
12:47Then you just arm it on the hook.
12:52And there you go.
13:11But the greatest technological advance in the Paleolithic period
13:15came over 35,000 years ago, with man's control of fire.
13:28Without light and without heat, you couldn't survive the Ice Age, no matter how many reindeer you killed.
13:40Prehistoric man discovered that by striking flint against iron pyrites,
13:45he could collect the sparks in dry tree fungus, which would then smoulder and start to burn.
13:53And he invented the bow drill, not a matter of brute force, but brain power.
14:01By keeping a steady rhythm, the fire will ignite.
14:06Both methods provide a compact fire-making kit, which could be carried around easily and used whenever the owner needed
14:13it.
14:14Man's control of fire is the first rung on the ladder that leads to the smelting of metals
14:20in the Bronze and Iron Ages and results in the foundries and steam engines of the Industrial Revolution.
14:28It was the cornerstone of future technology.
14:41300 centuries ago, Ice Age men, women and children, families, sat around similar campfires keeping the cold at bay.
14:52They were not just surviving this inhospitable environment, they were thriving in it.
14:57Their knowledge of their landscape and prey gave them an understanding of the seasons, the sun and the moon.
15:07So here we are at a hunter's feast and what I've got on my plate here, aside from the bread,
15:14which is a Neolithic invention, of mushrooms, chestnuts and salad vegetables, all of which
15:21would have been provided by women and not by men. Women would have gathered the bulk of the food,
15:26so really it should be called a gatherer's feast.
15:31The image of the highly intelligent hunter, amply providing for his family,
15:36is still only half the story, maybe less than half.
15:39The contribution of women and their role in this society reveals even more about life in the Ice Age.
16:12In the old stone age hunting grounds in the shadows of the French Pyrenees,
16:16we have seen that the people of the Ice Age were just as intelligent as we are today.
16:30Now I've moved 200 miles north to the Vézère Valley in the Dordogne.
16:35Because of its rich prehistoric heritage, it's known as the Valley of Man.
16:41But I've come in search of the women and their role in this society.
16:56One of the reasons why we underestimate our Stone Age ancestors,
17:00so often and so systematically, is because we only look at half the story.
17:06The image of the macho Ice Age hunter single-handedly killing the mammoth,
17:10has much more to do with the male ego and male archaeologists than with reality.
17:16In fact, the Upper Paleolithic diet may have been only 20% meat.
17:21So not only is the remaining 80% of food to be accounted for,
17:25but also the other 50% of the population gathering it.
17:30What about this image then of man the mighty hunter who's, you know,
17:34whether it's a mammoth or some other huge creature,
17:36I mean, attacking it with spears and bringing it home to the wife?
17:40I mean, is that not...
17:41Who's going to risk standing in front of, next to, beside, behind adult elephants
17:47and attempt to kill them with non-gunpowder-related projectiles?
17:53The risk is incredible.
17:55It's not an exaggeration to say, as it is for most hunter-gatherers,
17:59that females are bringing in a large chunk of the bacon, however you define the bacon.
18:08Women and children were providing berries, leaves, fruits, nuts, vegetables,
18:14and some meat like rabbits and hares.
18:21We know from the condition of their skeletons that Ice Age people were in very good shape.
18:27They had a healthy lifestyle and were living longer than ever before.
18:34In fact, studies of skeletons from the later Neolithic period show that,
18:38with the advent of agriculture, general health and life expectancy went down, not up.
18:45So much for progress.
18:47It's really the grandmother revolution in the Upper Paleolithic,
18:50because you have grandmothers for the first time and you've got someone to babysit.
18:55Who else are you going to get to babysit? No, seriously.
18:58No, no, I know. It's just surprising to think about.
19:01Well, yes, because if you don't have your...
19:02No, it makes a lot of sense. That frees you up to do something else.
19:05Exactly. Exactly.
19:07By up to failure, you're having women living to post-reproductive age.
19:13You have the grandmother revolution, which has brought us here, is one take.
19:18You have the tendency in Western society now to think of the old,
19:21of burdens essentially on the social system, when in point of fact,
19:25their repositories not only have infant care kinds of things, but a whole bunch of knowledge.
19:30They can not only do a lot of things, they can tell you a lot of things.
19:37For example, we know perfectly well to get huge crashes
19:40in reindeer populations every 90 to 100 years. We know this from data in northern latitudes.
19:49And so here comes grandpa, you know, who remembers his father telling him that reindeer crashed.
19:55And when reindeer crash or when they don't show up, this is how we handle it.
20:05The grandmother revolution meant that the burden of childcare was shared and women were free to play
20:15an increasingly active role in a more complex society.
20:22This is where a lot of people come for their summer holidays, not just from other parts of France,
20:28but from other countries too. Now, it's a wonderful environment, but in Stone Age times,
20:33it was very different. It was like Piccadilly Circus down here. People were coming from what's now
20:38Germany and from the Atlantic coast, from further north in France, because this is what archaeologists
20:45call an aggregation centre. The place where they would meet relatives, where they exchange goods,
20:51raw materials, jewellery. And this is really where they caught up with all the business of the whole region.
21:0635,000 years ago, this small valley of Castle Merle in the Dordogne was the commercial heart of the region.
21:15Here, hundreds of hours of labour were spent transforming the raw material brought down these rivers
21:21into thousands of beads.
21:24It's really quite stunning to see in these excavations hundreds, even thousands of beads,
21:30for example, because they're not just making beads out of any old thing. They're making beads
21:34basically out of two substances, woolly mammoth ivory and soapstone from exotic sources, hundreds of kilometers away.
21:43These are actually beads that are being sewn onto garments, onto presumably skin, animal skin garments,
21:49just as a sequined dress, for example, would illustrate today. And that means that the individual elements
21:55have to be extremely standardised. They have to be the same shape, the same form, because they constitute
22:00individual almost invisible elements of a larger decorative pattern. We have evidence in this valley that
22:07some of the stages of this production only exist at certain of the sites here. It leads me to suspect
22:13that
22:13a part of this process is taking place in one site and then the beads are being finished in another
22:18site,
22:19which suggests that there may be a division of labour that's embedded in this process.
22:25So it's a kind of production line, in a way. That must take a lot of organisation.
22:30It speaks to a lot of common sense, a lot of skill, a knowledge of the raw materials and
22:38collaboration and communication among different individuals and apparently among different groups.
22:43You have to imagine that people had the time to create these kinds of things and they weren't
22:49using every spare moment to put food in their mouths. It's a whole new social world that we're
22:56talking about here in evolutionary terms. These ice age communities were not struggling to survive.
23:05In fact, they had adapted in a highly effective way to the hostile environment.
23:12They had the time to make these thousands of tiny beads and they had the organisational ability to run
23:18a factory, producing beads to a standard size of only six millimetres, too small for a man's hand to finish.
23:26This must mean that the final process, the end of the production line, was done by women.
23:40It was a busy commercial centre with trade and communication networks over amazing distances.
23:47And women were at the heart of this complex society, providing food and contributing to the local economy.
23:561,200 miles northeast of the Veser valley, following the trade routes of the ice age entrepreneurs,
24:03I've come to the wide valleys of Moravia in the Czech Republic, source of their most desirable commodity, mammoth ivory.
24:14Archaeological excavations have uncovered more clues about the role of women in these societies,
24:19and about how highly they were valued.
24:29Compared to the Veser valley, this is a much wider valley with floodplains and would have been an
24:34environment ideally suited to roaming mammoths. But whether the Stone Age people who actually
24:41once camped here, once camped here, whether they hunted the mammoths or whether they just
24:47scavenged from the elephants graveyards, I don't know.
24:58But this place, Dona Vesta Nietzsche, which is called the New York of the Upper Paleolithic period,
25:08it's a bit hard to visualize because now there's absolutely nothing left of it to see. It's been turned
25:18into a vineyard. And I guess I just have to console myself with a glass of the local wine.
25:33The museum house in Dona Vesta Nietzsche offers refuge from disappointment. It has some of the most
25:40precious treasures of the whole ice age, all recovered from this site. There are traces of an extremely
25:47early ceramics industry, pieces of animal and some human figurines. And there are hundreds of other
25:54fragments which hold the key to yet another breakthrough in technology, which might have
25:59remained obscure and hidden had there been anything on TV the night Olga invited Jim around for dinner.
26:07One evening we were sitting after dinner. There was really nothing on the telly worth watching.
26:13And I thought, as entertainment, I would show him the slides and ask him what he thought they may have
26:19been. And so we projected these and Jim immediately sort of looked at me and said,
26:26very clearly, these are textile impressions.
26:32The discovery made by Olga and Jim meant that textile technologies previously credited to Neolithic
26:38times were proven to have existed tens of thousands of years earlier amongst the ice age communities of
26:45Eastern Europe. Nearly 30,000 years ago, the women here in Dona Vesta Nietzsche were weaving their own fine cloths,
26:56sewing exotic costumes, braiding their hair, making hats, baskets, ropes and nets.
27:03Such was the extent to which they exploited plant fibres in everyday life.
27:11These are scarcely primary essays in the craft. They're already really good at it by the time
27:16they're making these things. The level of sophistication in these pieces is already so high
27:23that it suggests that they were probably fooling with this technology for at least,
27:27you know, five, ten thousand years earlier than this.
27:32At Dona Vesta Nietzsche, they're making their textiles by the two methods known today. One
27:38which is twining and you can do that with your fingers and you really don't need very many accessory
27:43tools for it. On the other hand, they also have plain weave and to make that you do need battens
27:49or
27:49weaving, loom sticks or whatever you want to call them.
27:53Weaving brings in to focus the labour of a group of people that we have not considered before
28:01in prehistory, specifically women. We know ethnographically plant-based technologies from
28:08the harvesting of the plants to final production of textiles is very heavily female-related labour.
28:17There are traces of this Ice Age fashion industry on a number of female statuettes found at various
28:24sites across Europe. They depict sewn seams, basket hats and braiding which speak of a high level of
28:32sophistication and aesthetic sensibility. And these, the so-called Venus figurines, what other insights
28:40can they offer about the role of women in this elegant society?
28:53Just as I was about to look at my Venus figurines, so...
29:02She's from France, she's a local girl from here in Dona Vesta Nietzsche and the most famous of them all,
29:09the famous Venus of Willendorf from neighbouring Austria. They're all quite buxom, that's true,
29:15but all of them are over 20,000 years old, so they're definitely older women. What they were for? Well,
29:22some people would say that they're art. Other people would say that they're pornography.
29:29Now, in the past, the view primarily of male archaeologists was that these were all carved by men
29:36for men. Many people saw them as a kind of Paleolithic playboy or cheesecake.
29:42Stone Age hunters, when they were out for the day, would have taken their favourite Venus figurine
29:48with them to admire. Other people would say that they were made by women.
29:53For women's purposes, and of course, young girls in the society would have had to be taught all the
29:58mysteries of the female life, and it's quite possible that some of these figurines were used for that.
30:03Although, there's no way we can tell that they're made by women or by men, and that they were some
30:08kind of fertility symbol. These may have been some sort of amulets or fetishes, if you will,
30:14related to the birthing process, which for me may be more about protecting the mother's health,
30:19and actually having a successful birthing event, than it is about increasing the number of people,
30:25or about fertility. So, your guess is as good as anybody else's, because...
30:31There is no such thing as the generic Venus figurine. There's a lot of pattern variability in them,
30:37suggesting that there's a lot of different meaning.
30:43As I leave Dolny Vestinitsa, it is abundantly clear to me that we have consistently underestimated the
30:50people of the Ice Age, not only by denying them the credit for the wealth of technological advances,
30:56and the complexity and organisation of their society, but by denying them the diversity of personality and
31:02talent which we give to ourselves. While some people would be conscientious hunters, gatherers,
31:08bead makers or weavers, others probably got out of their heads all the time on magic mushrooms,
31:14or gambled away everything they'd saved up for winter, and then scrounged off their relatives till
31:18spring. You had men and women. You had all kinds of people doing all of the different things that we
31:26do today.
31:30But what kind of people would want to crawl 250 feet on their stomachs, in total darkness,
31:37to engrave a picture of a young female deer? Two ears, the eye. It is one of the best drawings
31:44from the Paleolithic time.
31:53To our way of thinking, things may seem to have happened slowly during the Ice Age.
31:58But whether we realise it or not, all the inventions and discoveries of the modern world are the outcome
32:04of earlier human ingenuity, which can be traced back to our Paleolithic ancestors.
32:10These people were piecing together the world with skill, knowledge and genius. But in order to glimpse
32:18inside their heads, we need to leave these mountains and valleys, the rivers and the rock shelters,
32:23and make a voyage into the unknown, underground.
32:52Contrary to our primary school pre-history lessons, the great cave complexes of France
32:56and Spain were rarely used as homes. They are damp, dark and inhospitable.
33:09Nor were they intended as art galleries, for although some of the paintings are quite accessible, others are not.
33:18To reach the paintings here in Neo Cave, you have to walk over half a mile underground.
33:24In some parts, prehistoric artists would have had to crawl and climb the often slippery and hazardous rock
33:30with just a naked flame to guide them.
33:34Their determination to explore deep into the caves was obviously so strong that they were not deterred by any risks.
33:42Nor were they hoping for worldly applause for their paintings and engravings.
33:46For deep in the earth, there was no admiring public.
33:50The artists seem to have been communicating, not so much with man, but with their gods.
34:09So here we are in the Salon Noir.
34:13It's taken 20 minutes to get here from the entrance.
34:17And during that 20 minutes, I've realized that the journey is as important as the arriving.
34:21And I'm sure this was the same for the prehistoric pilgrims who once came here.
34:27And this round room was the ceremonial centre of the whole cave.
34:33People would have sung, they would have danced, they would have played music,
34:38and they would have told stories and myths.
34:43But all of that was over 10,000 years ago.
34:47Today, all we have of this whole prehistoric ritual is the visual memory
34:52embodied in the animal paintings on the walls.
34:55It's clear from looking at the cave art, they had the most intimate, detailed knowledge
35:00of the anatomy of the animals, the behaviour of the animals.
35:03The observation of animals is so precise that we can, in many instances,
35:08pinpoint the season that's being depicted.
35:11For example, in some cases, you have very shaggy horses in their winter coats,
35:15or you have salmon, male salmon, with a hook on the jaw,
35:18which occurs just after spawning when they're exhausted.
35:22The more Ice Age art you look at, the more impressed you become
35:26by the sheer expertise of these people.
35:28They mastered every medium, every kind of technique.
35:32They could even engrave around cylinders of antler,
35:35so you could never see the whole image at once.
35:37And yet, when you roll it out, or bring it out with a photograph,
35:40the animals are in perfect proportion.
35:42There's a case in the cave of Lascaux, where they drew the famous falling horse,
35:46which again is painted all around a rock, so the artist could never see the whole thing at once.
35:51And yet, when you flatten it out with a photograph, again, it's in perfect proportion.
35:55These people were astonishingly skilled.
36:05When Lascaux was discovered in 1940, people couldn't believe that the skill and imagination
36:11shown in its paintings could have come from Stone Age man.
36:16It had to be a fake.
36:19But modern man has had to think again about his assumed superiority over his prehistoric ancestors.
36:27Perspective, which most people associate with the Renaissance,
36:30was right there in the cave of Lascaux.
36:33The legs on the far side of the animals, as you can see here, are not joined to the body.
36:39There is a very narrow gap between them, which clearly indicates that those are the legs furthest away.
36:47Picasso visited the cave of Lascaux, and when he came out, he said,
36:51we have invented nothing.
36:55He was quite right, because back in the Ice Age, even more than 30,000 years ago,
37:01they were playing around with perspective and using very sophisticated techniques.
37:09Thousands and thousands of people have come to admire the art from all over the world,
37:14but by 1963, the paintings had started to suffer from all the human contact in the cave,
37:21and the cave was shut off.
37:22So what we're looking at now is actually a faithful facsimile of the real Lascaux.
37:31It's a very good one.
37:34The makers of the facsimile were amazed at the skill of these artists,
37:39how they used the natural shapes and contours of the rock,
37:43the way they used colour, expressed movement, as well as their grasp of perspective.
37:50But if we are to get inside the minds of these prehistoric artists,
37:54we need to understand why they painted at all.
37:57And in order to do that, we need to know how they painted.
38:09I was born in this country, in this area, and when I was a child, I visited several painted caves
38:17with my father and my parents. And so, since then, I am interested in rock art,
38:23prehistoric and prehistoric rock art.
38:25And you're one of the few prehistorians who can also paint in the prehistoric style.
38:31That's right. I spent three years in Australia, and I've seen Australian Aborigines painting,
38:40and I learned a lot from them.
38:44Painting with fingers, and also the spitting technique, blowing the paint by mouse on the rock.
38:54And I learned a lot from them.
38:54Michel Loblanchet has continued his research back in his native France,
38:59recreating prehistoric paintings.
39:02The most complex to copy was this original in Pechemele Cave, close to where he grew up.
39:08It is a panel showing two horses.
39:12There are two horses, six hand stencils, there are 215 black dots, 30 red dots, seven stencils of
39:25folded fingers. But the experiment showed something else. These folded fingers are difficult for a male
39:34adult. Because, you know, to fold the finger like that, it's very hard for a male to do it.
39:41Whereas for a young woman, or a young man, it's easier.
39:46And also, when you are painting like that, using the hands, you need your two hands.
39:54So, somebody has to manage with the light. So it means that at least two people were working here.
40:01One for the light, and another one for the painting.
40:06So, when people saw just a hint of a horse, you think they would have wanted to almost add something?
40:12Yes, but the cave already showed them, and they suggested what to draw maybe. There is a relationship
40:20between the rock and the painter, and it's a complex relationship.
40:25So, it's a kind of dialogue between nature and humans.
40:28Exactly, dialogue, yes.
40:34This giant deer, it was first sketched in red, and it was repainted, redrawn in black on top.
40:45Like here, for example, there is a red line, and on top, a black one.
40:50So, the difference between the oldest and the youngest?
40:54Yes, it's about 10,000 years.
40:5610,000 years.
40:57The people who made the later paintings, what do you think they made of these earlier paintings?
41:03Probably, they believed that this painting had been made by spirits.
41:08Michel's work has led him to believe that the artists had a special relationship with their caves.
41:14The technique of spitting or blowing the paint was a way of breathing life into the rock,
41:20of communing with the animals, with the spirits of the natural world.
41:27So, the painter was also a priest.
41:30And to paint was the equivalent of praying.
41:39Religion, and I'm sure that's what it is, whether in the 21st century or 300 centuries in the past,
41:46religion is about working out where we came from.
41:50And this is what our ancestors were doing, just as we continue to do today.
41:56The bigger caves were like cathedrals, where people gathered in front of the paintings,
42:01to hear stories and perform rituals.
42:04But other caves were restricted sanctuaries, where only the priest was allowed to enter.
42:20For over ten years, Michel Laublanche has been unlocking the secrets of Purgosay Cave,
42:26a series of small, delicately engraved rooms linked by an extremely narrow tunnel, deep underground.
42:34No more than a handful of people have visited this cave since an Ice Age artist communed with the spirits
42:41in the depths of the earth. So it was with a mixture of anticipation and trepidation that I prepared
42:48to become one of the few to venture into this strange and constricted world.
42:54Okay, Richard.
42:55Okay.
42:56Yes, let's go.
42:58Okay.
43:02You have to crawl 250 feet on your stomach before you can even sit up.
43:08Then there's a succession of four rooms, and the further you go into them,
43:13the more chaotic the engravings become.
43:17This is a communion with the earth, and it is intensely physical.
43:22It's a personal experience that forces you to think about where you came from.
43:37There is an apex.
43:38The eye, oval, and the horns, with the notches, and the head, the nose, the jaw, the chest.
43:47It is complete, a complete animal.
43:58The two ears, the eye.
44:01It is one of the best flowing of the Paleolithic time.
44:14The eye, oval, and the tail.
44:15We are in room four, and the engravings, they depict fantastic creatures made of different
44:21parts of different animal species, and we call them usually monsters.
44:27This one looks like a doe, the head with the ears, but the neck here looks like a horse neck,
44:36and the tail looks like a bovid tail.
44:40So this animal is partly a doe, partly a horse, and partly a bison or an aurochs.
44:48Quite different from the apex at the beginning.
44:51So, in a way, you're saying that in this part of the cave, the figures are in embryonic form.
44:58The animals are not fully formed.
45:01It's difficult to understand, of course, and we don't know exactly, but this is like if the cave
45:08was giving birth to the animal world.
45:13They are coming from the chaos.
45:15They are less naturalistic than at the beginning of the sanctuary.
45:31At the beginning of my journey into the Ice Age, I suggested that Stonehenge, built by Neolithic
45:37people about 5,000 years ago, was in fact a concrete expression of a pool of knowledge
45:42that had been native to northwestern Europe for over 20,000 years.
45:50My travels above and below the landscapes of Ice Age Europe have convinced me, more than ever,
45:56that our Upper Paleolithic ancestors were capable of designing and building their own equivalent of Stonehenge.
46:05They were more than capable.
46:09They had a knowledge of the sun, the moon and the seasons.
46:13They had advanced technologies, craft specialisation and trading links.
46:21A creative mind and a religious imperative.
46:25A complex social structure.
46:31And we know that they were able to pass this knowledge on, down through the generations
46:37and across the continents.
46:42The products of the ivory bead factory at Castelmerl are almost identical to beads found in Russia.
46:50Venus figurines appear in France and the Czech Republic.
46:54Cave paintings in France and in the southernmost tip of Spain.
47:00We may never know whether this knowledge was passed on through myths and from generation to generation,
47:06or whether these sophisticated societies could actually record information.
47:12But there are clues on the cave walls that suggest these people had advanced notation systems,
47:19codes which we are, as yet, unable to crack.
47:26For me, though, the fact that these Ice Age communities were able to pass on their knowledge
47:30through both time and space is the last piece in my jigsaw.
47:35The people of the Upper Paleolithic period could have built their own Stonehenge, so why didn't they?
47:58Maybe this small piece of engraved bone, fashioned and used in central France about 12,000 years ago,
48:05can point us in the right direction.
48:09It is less than four inches in length, but the Thai plaque has over a thousand minute marks engraved on
48:16it,
48:16in a continual serpentine manner.
48:19The analogy to think of is a watch face.
48:22The individual marks of seconds or minutes mean nothing in isolation,
48:26but in the context of the watch face, their significance is obvious.
48:32Maybe the same is true of these marks on the Thai plaque.
48:36For its Ice Age owner, the meaning would be clear.
48:41It has been said that the marks on the back could be the phases of the Moon.
48:46Perhaps it is a kind of clock, a means of noting the passing of the seasons,
48:50or of predicting the next solstice.
48:53In other words, it can do everything that Stonehenge can do.
49:06Today, people seem obsessed with gadgets.
49:10They like the freedom to phone, to fax and to email.
49:14The freedom to roam, just like our distant ancestors.
49:18Remember, these people were hunter-gatherers.
49:20They didn't need to leave their mark.
49:22They didn't even want to.
49:24And why would they have wanted this, when they could have this?
49:28The pocket Stonehenge.
49:33So far, we have journeyed back 40,000 years,
49:36and discovered that we have been a lot smarter,
49:38for a lot longer than we've given ourselves credit for.
49:48Shallow vír the friendship end?
49:53Not byali's
49:54All you have today here.
50:10semester, visit Mistress leider,
50:10we've got such a
50:10that we made the reasons we have
50:10The way to find out
50:11I לא don't want here,
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