The 30,000-Year-Old Cave That Descends Into Hell
There’s a cave in France where no humans have been in 26,000 years. The walls are full of fantastic, perfectly-preserved paintings of animals, ending in a chamber full of monsters 1312-feet underground, where CO2 and radon gas concentrations provoke hallucinations.
It’s called the the Chauvet-Pont-d’Arc Cave, a really weird and mysterious place. The walls contain hundreds of animals—like the typical Paleolithic horses and bisons—but some of them are not supposed to be there, like lions, panthers, rhinos and hyenas.
A few are not even supposed to exist, like weird butterflyish animals or chimerical figures half bison half woman. These may be linked to the hallucinations. The trip is such that some archeologists think that it had a ritual nature, with people transcending into a new state as they descended into the final room.
In fact, the paintings themselves are of such sophistication—some even have three-dimensional relief—that is hard to believe they were made back then. However, radiocarbon dating shows that these paintings are indeed prehistoric: A group was made around 27,000-26,000 years ago and the other at 32,000-30,000 years ago.
Aside from elsewhere in the solar system, this is by far the most beautiful and awe-inspiring places I’ve never been. I encourage anyone and everyone to take some time for yourself and watch Cave of Forgotten Dreams, by Werner Herzog. The journey, along with the images, will – and I promise – take your breath away. I put this documentary off for a pretty long time until about 2 years ago and I remember sitting there in pure amazement, tears running down my face, completely overcome with emotions from….beauty, absolute beauty.
Bit weird to me that the first thing science jumps to is hallucinations rather than a primitive culture complete with god like figures. We’re already finding that ancient cultures were much further along and more sophisticated than we previously believed. Why couldn’t that extend this far back?
That or magic.
Yeah, I went there.
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