Twenty thousand years ago near the Ardeche River in the South of France, a limestone cliff collapsed, burying a cave.  At the time, it’s unlikely the event attracted attention. One can image the thunderous roar quickly fading as a cloud of white and yellow dust settled over the surrounding forest.

Time resumed its inexorable passage. Vines and foliage grew over the rubble. Just as in a fairy tale—years…then centuries… then millennia passed.  Humans discovered agriculture; domesticated animals; invented the wheel and the alphabet. All the kingdoms of Europe; the Renaissance, the Enlightenment, the Industrial Revolution, along with the wars, horrors, and plagues of civilization flickered past like something out of a dream.

Then in 1994, three spelunkers searching for a new cave system to explore detected the gentlest breath of moist air escaping from a crack in a limestone wall.  The men worked at the crack until it was wide enough to squeeze through.

What they discovered that day was not particularly remarkable by caving standards.  There was no immense underground system notable for its depth, length, or technical difficulty. While the formations were beautiful, they were not particularly unique.

What the cavers did discover was a treasure house of the human soul, a monument to human expression as rare and precious as the Pyramids, the Louve, the cathedrals of Europe, or the temples of Angkor.

The Chauvet-Pont d’Arc Cave, as it is known today, is filled with exquisite cave paintings by the direct ancestors of modern humans—Cro Magnon Man.  Dated at 30 to 32 thousand years ago, it is the oldest cave art yet discovered, rivaling in technique and aesthetiques the paintings found in other famous Paleolithic sites such as Lascaux and Trois Frere.

Most of all, it is a testament to the central role art plays in the human soul.  Here at the very dawn of consciousness, we find artists as adroit, as skilled (and probably far more observant), than any graduate of a modern art school.

The paintings they created are an evocative record of a long vanished world. When these primal artists put down their pigments and walked outside, the last great Ice Age still gripped the Earth. Ice, nine thousand feet deep, encased the Alps.  Animals in numbers and variety unimaginable to modern humans— including mammoths, mastodon, aurochs, bison, ibex and reindeer roamed through ice-free corridors across the northern continents, and everywhere they went, they were pursued by deadly hunters— giant cave bears, panthers, packs of hyena, dire wolf, prides of lions, and man.

The floor of Chauvet is littered with the detritus of that lost Eden. There are cave bear skulls encased in crystal flow-stone like something out of a Tolkein fantasy.  The walls are incised by the bear’s claws.  The floor still holds the shallow depressions where they slept.

Four or five thousand years after the paintings were completed, a lone child left her foot prints in the soft sediment floor alongside the tracks of wolves.  They are the oldest human footprints that can be dated, and there is no indication that anyone else entered the cave until the present day.

Because of evidence found at other nearby sites, we also know that the people who came to Chauvet shared their world with a completely different species of human. Neanderthal man (Homo Neanderthalensis), hunted, loved, and fought for life in these same valleys, eventually losing his battle with extinction (but not before mixing his DNA with that of modern humans).

Of course, it is the art that draws us most. Drawn in darkness, illuminated only by the flickering of smoky torches, the artists drew prides of lions in such intimate detail it’s obvious to modern observers that the males of this extinct European species lacked the manes of their modern African counterparts.

Rhinoceros join in battle, jousting with spear-like double horns.  One panel features a cascade of horses in which shading, gradation, and detail bring to life the personality and vitality of these animals so convincingly one can almost hear them whinny across the vast chasm of 30 thousand years.

This is art in its quintessence— stripped of all its modern associations of money, commerce, celebrity and fame.  It is the pure expression of creativity in service to humanity.  To render as accurately as possible the major concerns of the race— to hunt and eat; to honor the relationship between human, animal, and spirit.  To invoke fertility in all it’s forms.  To take one’s rightful place in a perilous world with courage, humility and respect.

I knew nothing about the Chauvet Cave and its art until I saw the recent film by German film-maker Werner Herzog.  Titled “The Cave of Forgotten Dreams,” one of the film’s most profound moments comes when a young French archeologist tells the story of a western scientist traveling with an Australian Aborigine through the outback.  The two men take shelter in a cave filled with Aboriginal art.  The paintings are showing the ravages of time.  This makes the Aborigine sad, and (as is his people’s custom), he begins to re-touch the damaged art.  Observing and taking notes, the Westerner asks, “Why do you paint.”

The answer is telling, and defines the chasm that separates we moderns from our own past.  “I do not paint,” the Aborigine answered, “the spirits paint through me.”

Here is a direct view into the primeval world of the Pleistocene that gave birth to modern man.  This is the Earth in the full flower of her incredible vitality. We owe the length of our stride, the angle of our gaze, the very fabric of our minds to that long vanished world.  A place where humans and animals were once united, inseparable, interwoven threads in the vast tapestry of life.

Over the vast abyss of time, the artistic vision of Chauvet moves us, because on some profound level, we are still the same.  In other European caves, archeologists have discovered exquisite flutes carved from the leg bones of vultures.  Without much practice, modern humans can pick up these instruments and learn to play music, because the flutes play the same pentatonic scale that remains the foundation of western music today.

More than thirty thousand years have passed.  Much has changed, yet the human mind and it’s desire for artistic expression remains.

Herzog’s film made me think about the similarities linking the cave painters with landscape and wildlife photographers working today. Strip away commercial concerns, and we can still see the hunter/gatherer mind at work— concentrating mightily on the details of the natural world through which it moves.  Attempting to notice and make use of every detail.  Focused, yet relaxed.  Fluid and open to all the opportunities which present themselves. Reverent and humble before the power of nature.

Then there’s the totemic aspect of the image that is created.  Just as we can surmise that the painters in Chauvet hoped to gain greater connection with the animals they painted, as well as increased power through that association, I believe that on some subconscious level, modern artists still try to do the same—to see more clearly, to understand more fully, to bring back some artifact imbued with a trace of the power and wonder humans have always experienced in the natural world.