Ask an Archaeologist, Episode 15: What is the Grotte Chauvet and Why is it Important? w/ Meg Conkey

[@wendistewart2774]

Thank you for this wonderful interview. And i am happy The Final Passage is still available!

[@maryscott1122]

This was an amazing video. How absolutely breathtaking, these cave drawings are. We are so lucky and privileged to see all these beautiful drawings. The artists drawings are spectacular, I’m blown away by the cave and art work. Thank you for sharing, an awesome documentary. Would like to visit Chauvet cave one day. 👏🏼🥰

[@daveb7585]

Meg! Nico! Fantastic presentation. I wish I'd have known about it when you did it: I certainly would have tuned in. Thank you for posting it up on youtube. Can't wait to be down Berkeley-way again. Dave

[@stefanthorpenberg887]

Seems that many archeologists look too close on the pictures on the walls and focus on the dating of them. If so, of course it’s obvious that the art is very early, and that it’s made during aurignacian time. But perhaps it necessary also to ask what they were doing in the caves, and why they were painting there. The findings of footprints from young people, sexual symbols and bones from cave bears reminds of the findings in the Bruniquel cave from 176 000 years ago. Neanderhals also got together deep in a cave with rings built from stalagmites, that looks like sexual symbols, and there are findings of burnt cave bear bones. Up to now people around the world have symbolic initiation rites where children goes from childhood to adult life, and this seems to back to neanderthal time. Also the symbolic value of the most dangerous animal, the cave bear, seems to back almost 200 000 years, which is a very interesting trait.

[@stefanthorpenberg887]

In the 1970s I met a music researcher who studied laplandic joyks. He recorded shamans in Northern Sweden who sang different joyks. The joyks had different names, often from animals, like foxes and wolfes. But when the shaman came to the bear song, he got into trance within some few seconds, and he showed how it sounded; ”birra volle, ho ho hooo, birra volle, haj haj hooo”.

[@douglasgrant8315]

What I find interesting is the fact that there are no drawings of Saber tooth's, Wooly Mammoths or Giant Sloths.. You do see a drawing of a species of an elephant but its not a mammoth. Either the dating is wrong and the drawings are much younger or the age for those species that I just mentioned are much older than what is accepted.. I think the date is much younger based on the kind of animals that were drawn which most still exist still to the present up to now despite the charcoal carbon dating..