Cave paintings

So one of the things I got to do last weekend was go see "Cave of Forgotten Dreams," directed by Werner Herzog. Basically, there are areas in the south of France that are on limestone and just riven with cave systems; occasionally, these are found to have evidence of ancient humanity. The most famous is, of course, the cave of paintings at Lascaux, but the Chauvet finds are even older, dating from 33,000 years ago. They let Werner Herzog in with a camera to document it, and he turned it into a 90-minute digital 3-D film.

It was AWESOME. Just amazing. The paintings were mostly of animals, and entirely untouched. Even more fascinating is that the cave system was in use for some time; for example, one of the paintings depicts a herd of oxen. It wasn't originally a herd, though. Someone drew an ox, then someone else came along FIVE THOUSAND YEARS LATER and drew another ox. So the caves were in use, known of, and the images were of things that would have remotely similar meanings.

(Incidentally, the narration on the film is entirely worth ignoring. It ranges from the banal to the irritating to the whifty. But they're never going to allow the public into these caves, so this is as close as you can get.)

It was also a painful reminder of how little we know, and how little we will ever know. Those people - recognizably us, definitely homo sapiens sapiens - had a culture, apparently had religious beliefs, and we will never know what they were.

The amount of stuff that gets lost to time is staggering. (Actually, the amount we've been able to infer from limited data is equally staggering. For example, they know that humans started wearing clothes about 100,000 years ago, courtesy of the lice we carried along with us. Most other mammals get infested with one type of louse, whereas we have two: head lice and clothing lice, and ne'er the twain shall meet. Biologists were able to extrapolate backwards to see that the two species diverged about 100,000 years ago. Well done, clever people!)

So much of what we do is ephemera. If you're extraordinarily lucky and manage to get a piece of paper stored in *exactly* the right conditions, it might last a few thousand years. Leather, maybe a little longer. (This is why the Declaration of Independence is barely legible and the Magna Carta is still pretty clear.) Modern media is the worst, to the point that people worry that we might be entering a digital dark age, where future historians will have NO idea how we lived on a day-to-day basis. The videotapes from the Viking Mars missions in the 1970s are already degrading to the point of illegibility. Basically, if you want it to last, get it off your computer.

But I've always held that people don't really change. Not fundamentally. How they express their fundamental humanity might change, but deep down, at the end of the day, they want to have enough to eat; to not be alone; to love their children and to continue on into the future.

I love it when they find an old trove of letters, the only medium truly written for a contemporary reader as opposed to the public or posterity. Roman letters found in Britain, near Hadrian's wall, talk of birthday parties and sending pairs of socks to a soldier deployed far from home. There's a wonderful Sumerian letter in which the author instructs the recipient to remind so-and-so that that bastard still owes her money. And one of my favorite diary entries by Daniel Defoe talks about how, before a the Great Storm of 1703, his barometer fell so low that he thought that "the tube had been handled... by the children."

As the mother of two boys, I felt the most astonishing sense of kinship across three centuries.

One remnant of humanity they found, before the landslide which caused the cave to be abandoned, was the footprints of a child, possibly the oldest known human footprints that can be positively dated. Why was the kid there? Did he do some of the drawings? Was he just there to fetch somebody, to admire the handiwork, or did he have a role to play?

We'll never know.