Well, that was a good movie.

Cave paintings are so fucking awesome, in the truest sense of the word; I am filled with awe at seeing 35,000 year old art. The paintings in the Chauvet cave are the oldest paintings known in the world.

You really have to think about what the place was like then. It was the ice age. There were mammoths and wooly rhinos and lions and bears and aurochs and bison.

There were fucking rhinoceroses and hyenas in EUROPE. That’s hard to fathom.

Not to mention Neanderthals. You have to wonder how they interacted. The Neanderthals were pretty sophisticated technologically, but they don’t seem to have had art. Penes hominem sapientem est ars, you might say (I hope that’s right).

One thing that was pretty interesting was that before these paintings were discovered, archaeobiologists did not know if ancient cave lions had manes like modern African lions. But there’s a picture on the wall, a very good, nearly life-size picture, of a male and female lion together. No mane.

I was also thinking about what the cave was for, how it was used, and how its use was controlled or governed. Because there’s art, but there’s no sort of willy-nilly drawings or graffiti; this makes me think that it must have been somehow sacred or protected, and only certain people were allowed to paint there. People never lived in the cave.

The other amazing thing is that some of the murals were painted over periods of like 5000 years. I mean, think of Pompeii and the 2000 year old paintings on the walls of houses, and imagine that you’re an artist and you’re going to add to those paintings. You wouldn’t dream of it. But here someone looked at this painting of rhinos fighting, that had already been there for millennia, and thought, you know, this could use some bison just over here. And then, thousands of years later, someone else thought, say, some horses would be nice on this.

That is fucking amazing. And they can’t have even known how old the paintings were. “Oh yes, they’ve been there all my life, and my grandfather told me that he’d seen them 40 years ago, and his grandfather 50 years before that.” “Well, that’s pretty cool, now about these horses I want to put on here.”

And it’s real art, not a first attempt; whoever drew these things had a bit of practise beforehand. That makes me think that works were maybe commissioned by a sort of priest or shaman who controlled the use of the cave, just like the pope paid Michelangelo to do the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel.

Anyway, I recommend this film to sagacious persons who enjoy art.