A significant rescue operation was held in Thailand nearly three years ago. An entire football team was trapped under a cave along with their coach. The whole of humanity seemed to care about it and wanted to lend their hands in the rescue attempt. Perhaps not everyone—as a number of onlookers did raise questions like—why on earth that football team entered the cave in the first place, eh? The question feels absurd and stupid. Humans were always drawn to ancient caves, perhaps it goes beyond mere curiosity. Some kind of instinct plays a role as well.
Archaeologists and paleontologists risked their lives to venture into the caves, time and time again. Their expeditions cannot be seen as meaningless. Once upon a time these natural caves were shelters for our ancestors. Safe haven from the numerous predators they had to share the earth with. These caves are the witnesses of their ephemeral journeys. As a species, we've been searching for the meaning of our existence for so long, is it really a wonder that we'd try to retrace lost memories of our ancestors wondering in those caves?
Chauvet cave, southern France. It bears evidence of human activities that dates back to 32,000 years in the past. There's cave paintings all over—pictures of various prehistoric animals, including herbivores and carnivores. The floor of the cave is filled with skulls of those animals. However, there are no human skeletons. Researchers suggest, the cave might have been used as a place of pilgrimage, not for residential purposes. The most bewildering thing about the cave is that—it does not contain histories of a single race or a people, or even a time. Carbon dating revealed some paintings were drawn a few thousands apart. Can you imagine?! Someone who entered the cave 28000 years ago, saw the painting from a few thousands years prior to his arrival. Perhaps he felt the surges of emotions in his blood, the same way we feel in presence of such artworks! Perhaps he then left his own drawings on the walls to mark his coming, his own existence in history! And he was not alone evidently. A lot of people came before and after his time. The cave played host for many generations over the millenniums, over aeons! Some time in the course of history, there was a cave in that sealed the cave. Then passed many many thousand of years. The cave went under thick layers of calcite here and there. Behind those layers of calcite—the paintings.
Unfortunately, these paintings cannot be fully observed. It's forbidden to walk around on the cave floor. After the discovery of the cave, French government closed the opening and restricted entry. Werner Herzog, the great neo german filmmaker, went in there with a small team to film it. The entire time they had to move on a narrow, metal platform. This is not unwarranted. The floor of the cave bears a lot of stories too. One of them caught my attention.
There are footprints of a wolf and a young child side by side. The question is—did the wolf follow the child into the cave to break his neck and stick its fangs into his juicy warm flesh? Or, did it came along with the boy as a pet? It's been a while since we've taken to adopting wild wolves after all (which later became dogs). Another possibility is that—perhaps those two sets of footprints are a few thousand years apart!
The questions hang in the air. Unanswered.
