What 37 000 Year Old Cave Paintings Reveal About Our Ancestors BBC Timestamp

Deep inside a cave, rudimentary marks have bloomed and multiplied. Red circles. There are no brushes, no sticks to lay on this paint. They are all applied orally. Colour swilled in the mouth with saliva and blown directly onto the rock. And then, these. An eruption of design, not blown onto the surface, but painted. Contours, outlines, flowing streams of dots. There's a meaning here, but we don't know what it is. The signs of a biological compulsion to pattern? It's what we humans do, what we want to do, what we can't stop ourselves doing. And then, you come across this. And in an instant, vast millennia of time just collapsed. And you're in the midst of fellow humans, their hands doing what hands do. Signalling from a very long way off. 37,000 years distant, in fact. But this long-distance greeting somehow makes us bond with the makers of this. Because they establish a presence that is palpably alive. Astonishingly, hand stencils like these have been found in caves as far apart as Indonesia and Patagonia. Wherever we went, it seems, the urge to signal a presence went with us. And undeniably, these hand stencils do what nearly all art that would follow would aspire to. First, they want to be seen by others. And then, they want to endure beyond the life of the maker. Like the earliest photographs, the images here are faded, indistinct. But something tantalising is happening. The realisation that we can, however crudely, represent. In another cave further west, in Asturias, 20 minutes walk away from any daylight are images that are anything but crude. This was a doubling of the world. A life copy. And executed with startling precision of drawing technique. They even understood modelling. Anatomical features following the rock wall surface of the cave. And there were many colours. Not just the ubiquitous red ochre, but violets and blacks. And all those techniques seem to have been there from the beginning. Tens of thousands of years ago. When you think about this technique, your head just spins. Because it has to have been, above all, a memory exercise. They would have had to fix in their mind exact anatomical details. And then transpose them here on the surface of the cave. And yet, when all that was done, they managed to preserve, miraculously, this animal vitality. This is truly one of the great marvels of the suddenly expanded human mind. But as the number of painted caves discovered grew, it became clear that art and music came into the world together. For musical instruments were found. Animal horns. Flutes made from the bones of vultures. And even more hauntingly, bull-roarers. A piece of wood tied to a rope spun round the head that makes this strange whooping sound. Recent experiments with these instruments have suggested that the proximity of painting and music was not accidental. That they were connected elements in sacred rituals.