My camera ran out of batteries and my charger is in another state, so I can't post photos from a hike up Mt. Hamilton this past blogging period. Instead, I will talk about a German guy talking about French caves.
I saw a documentary (in 3-D!) called "Cave of Forgotten Dreams" directed by a guy with a cool voice, Werner Herzog. Some explorers were measuring the windy drafts in some French hills in search of caves -- unexplained drafts could be a sign that there is a cave structure nearby. They came across a Chauvet Cave, which contains the oldest cave paintings ever discovered, some older than 30,000 years old. 30,000 years ago, during the Paleolithic Period, there were still Neanderthals competing with early homo sapiens. Wooly mammoths and huge cave bears roamed the earth, which was in the middle of an ice age. Hunting was done with spears and spear-throwing sticks. And some early Frenchmen were painting on the walls. (What were they painting with? The documentary was unclear about this. I think charcoal, though some of the paintings were red.)
The paintings were then sealed off from the external environment by a landslide. (How did explorers sense drafts from the cave if it was sealed? The documentary was unclear about this. I guess there were very small openings.) In the closed-off environment, mineral deposits started forming stalagmites and stalagtites and thin crusts of calcite on top of things. One cave bear skull became covered in about an inch of mineral stuff over the years, affixing it to the floor. Fossilized cave bear footprints were also found.
Carbon dating showed that the paintings came from two periods about 5,000 years apart. People came across cave paintings that were already what we might consider ancient these days, and they painted right next to them. It's sort of as if you found original art from the first Egyptian dynasty and decided to doodle on it.
The painters used the natural curvature of the cave walls to guide their painting. A frequently-cited example of this technique is the panel of the horses, though you cannot see the curvature much here:
The chamber of the lions was also quite impressive:
Also in the chamber of the lions was a painting on a stalagtite of a naked woman with a bull's head:
(If that's confusing, you're looking at the lower half of a woman, with a bull's head somewhere in her stomach.)
Werner Herzog was also so kind as to bring in a man dressed in ice-age-style reindeer furs to demonstrate a replica of a flute found in the cave. Just looking at Werner and his guest, you might be able to see that this was an entertaining segment of the film:
I was trying to find some history to put 30,000 years ago in perspective, and what I found is that that's about as old as the earliest pottery, and it's about the time that people started living in Japan. I still don't think I have a good sense of how long 30,000 years is. If anyone has a better way of thinking about this, post a comment.
Until then, I'll leave you with this painting of a horse, scratched by a cave bear:
Next time, Mt. Hamilton.
