Today we visited the "Grotte de Pech-Merle » which is a cave in the region of Lot. This cave contains beautiful prehistoric cave art between 15000 and 25000 years old. These amazing pieces of art date back to the earliest humans in Europe and are surprisingly sophisticated. In one of the deepest galleries we found something positively breath taking. It is really simple, all it is is the footprint of a child in the mud of the gallery, except that this child lived 15000 years ago at the very beginning of human history. There is a complete foot print and part of other prints as if the children were dancing around. It kind of brings into focus that they were as human as we are. These are not my pictures since you are not allowed to take pictures of the cave art since a flashes would quickly degrade the pictures.
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| a child’s 15000 year old foot print |
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| a bears head |
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| Horses 24000 years old |
We also visited the medieval village of St-Cirq La Popie. This is a very beautiful village perched on a limestone cliff 200 meters above the River Lot. The streets are really in three dimensions, left and right as well as up and down. The people who live there must have great leg muscles since you are continuously walking up and down steep hills.
4 comments:
Oooh, that footprint - really cool. It must be so strange standing in front of something like that.
CooChoo: Oh yes it is... connects us to the past
You are so lucky to see that cave art. I wonder what the process was back then of wanting to express something and figuring out how to do it.
That village made my legs hurt as it reminded me of walking around San Francisco for several days. It hurt one leg to walk uphill and it hurt the other leg to walk downhill. I'm not sure what that means.
Geewits: you are probably an equal opportunity pain distributor. As for the cave art I'm sure that like us they needed to express themselves. There was a also a part of it that had religious connotations, a sort of sympathetic magic. If they portrayed the animal, it would be there the next day for the hunt. There was also some depictions of a human body with arrows (looked like simple lines to me). A sort of voodoo doll I suppose.
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