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In the Werner Herzog film, Cave of Forgotten Dreams , investigators examine the cave of Chauvet in southern France where they discovered what proved to be the oldest cave art known, dating from thirty-two thousand years ago. The cave's mouth had been closed by a landslide about twenty thousand years ago; and so the exquisite paintings of horses, rhinos, ibex, bison, mastodons, lions and bears remained pristine through the millennia. The cave was closed to the public immediately so that scientific analysis by archaeologists, paleontologists, art historians and computer scientists could begin. A detailed three-dimensional digital map covering every point of the cave was created and has become the standard reference point for all further investigators. Radio carbon analysis traced various painting campaigns over the cave's long use, and very careful, if old-fashioned, visual analysis also identified one of the cave's painters: the six-foot-tall, probable male with the crooked pinky finger who left his positive hand prints throughout the cave's chambers. One of the most intriguing sequences in the film was the brief discussion of how one set of paintings was revisited and overdrawn with another set of images that enhanced the first. This second painter used the same techniques, at the same spot – but five thousand years later. The brief mention was astounding: what kind of cultural memory would have to be enshrined in physical retracing, mapping, secret sharing, ritual initiation, artistic tradition, song, dance or other cultural referents so that one could retrace the steps of long-dead ancestors during a time when most life spans must have been little more than a single human generation? We know that Australian Aboriginals have handed down similar memories and artistic traditions, and we do have some idea of the methods by which such deep cultural memory is transmitted in both spiritual and physical memory.
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