My absolute favourite book (and podcast!) currently is John Green’s The Anthropocene Reviewed – a collection of essays that ranks things of the Anthropocene (the era of humans) on a five-star scale. In the book, there’s a chapter on the Lascaux cave paintings in France. These paintings were discovered in 1940 by a group of teenagers and were eventually dated to be at least seventeen thousand years old. The teenagers who discovered these paintings in this cave were so moved by them that they camped the winter out by the cave in order to protect it. They would eventually fight in the French Resistance – one even was captured and sent to a prison camp – but they ultimately ended up back where they were, watching over the cave.
I’ve never seen these paintings in real life. In fact, none of us will, as the real thing was closed to the public in 1963 due to the damage that artificial lighting was doing to the art. But three (three!) meticulous copies of the cave exist in France for people to see.
There must be something about these caves that had driven those teenagers to keep coming back to it, that had made the French government close it down for protection even though it was making a massive profit, that was important enough that three immaculate copies have been made. Looking at pictures of the cave, I really can’t put my finger down on what it is – wonder? or dread? I’m not sure. The idea that a human 17,000 years ago stood in a cave and made a hand stencil of themselves on the wall – a hand that is indecipherable from a modern human’s hand – for supposedly no functional purpose but to leave a mark of their presence certainly makes me feel something.
Maybe you can tell me.
If you’d like to listen to the episode of the podcast that inspired this post, here it is.
Learn more about the cave and take a guided tour!
