Chauvet Cave - The cave paintings and rock art of Chauvet

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Chauvet Cave

The cave paintings and rock art of Chauvet

The Chauvet Cave is located near the Vallon-Pont-d'Arc in the Ardèche region of southern France. The Cave Paintings of Chauvet date to 30,000 to 32,000 years ago. In the Chauvet Cave hundreds of animal paintings have been found making Chauvet Cave one of the world's most important rock art sites.

Chauvet Cave Through the Mind of a Sculptor

Visit to the Chauvet Cave in 2001 by John Robinson

The Vineyard map When you look down on the vineyard below the terrace on the way up to the cave, it is possible to determine how the landscape was formed long before man came on the scene. The river now cuts through what was a great wall of limestone that forced the river in a wide loop around it.

When the river wore away the dam and began instead to flow through the Arch, the loop silted up and became what is now a broad flat valley some 500 yards wide. The migrating herds would have used this passageway to bypass the Arch, which is totally impassable. The valley floor would also have made a perfect campsite for a gathering of the Clans. It is not hard to imagine a Corroboree of singing, dancing, and match making around giant fires that burned all night.

Did they believe?

Although the Bear Clan people had minds exactly like our own, I wonder if they believed they had souls? Personally I think they would have because they obviously believed they could communicate with the Animal Spirit World just like the Unambal Tribe.

Jung’s God-image

Surely this is all part and parcel of what Jung described as the God-image? Thanks to Richard Dawkins, author of The Selfish Gene, I think we now have a very good scientific explanation of why Jung was correct in his assumption.

Gods in the Chauvet Cave

The Human Brain has been doing a lot of thinking over the last 130,000 years. Descartes wrote, “I think therefore I am”. From the evidence of the drawings the Bear Clan were definitely Thinkers but had they thought about “life after death?” I am sure they had.

No Chauvet Bones

One of the mysteries of Chauvet for me is the absence of human bones. What did the Bear Clan do with dead bodies? One of the problems that have faced Mankind even before he started thinking about the possible existence of a “life after death”, has been how to dispose of dead bodies.

Australia

I keep on returning to what Doctor Lommel recorded when he was living with the Unambal in 1938. When a member of an Aborigine tribe died their body was placed in the fork of a tree and allowed to decompose. The skull and the long bones were then collected and wrapped in a parcel of tree bark, which looked like a giant Christmas cracker. The man’s widow carried the parcel around for a year before she deposited it in a cave near the painting of the Wandjina God who was the deceased ancestor. These bark parcels disintegrated over a short period of time, but having seen one myself in 1993 in a remote cave in Kimberley, this practice must still have been in use until quite recently.