Whether we call it art or not,
there's something absolutely wonderful,
isn't there, just about this activity,
that's a form of thinking and feeling
through just doing, through making.
I've been doing this for 40 years, just trying to make things that ask
that question - what does it feel like to be alive now?
For me, art is the best tool we have for trying
to understand our place in the world,
and I think that's what it's done, since it began,
tens of thousands of years ago.
I want to go back to the very beginning,
to see the art of our ancestors.
Wow.
And understand what compelled them to create these images.
This is so moving, I mean, so tender.
Once we believed that art began
with the cave paintings of Ice Age Europe,
but, now, new discoveries are overturning that idea.
I'm going to travel across the world to piece together a new story
of when and where art really began...
It still strikes me as a complete miracle.
..and find out what it can tell us about who we are.
Absolutely magnificent.
If we can look closely at the art of our ancestors...
..perhaps we will be able to reconnect
with something vital that we have lost.
14,000 years ago, a small group of humans came to this valley.
This is the Vezere, in the south of France.
It was here, during the last Ice Age, that modern humans created some
of the most extraordinary works of art the world has ever seen.
When I was a student, this was thought to be the place
where art began, and this is where my own journey began,
almost 40 years ago.
I came here with my wife on our honeymoon.
We'd just graduated from art school.
We had a Renault 4 van and a tent,
and we went on a road trip together, to see the beginnings of art.
So much has changed since then, for me.
I want to start this journey by returning here,
a tiny cave, called Les Combarelles.
The images in this cave were made between 14 and 16,000 years ago.
They aren't the earliest we know of,
but they are some of the most exciting to me...
..because, here, you can feel the raw creative process in action,
as images start to emerge in the torchlight.
It's extraordinary for me to think that I was this very cave
38 years ago.
That feeling, that remembrance of going into something very secret,
and very sacred.
Just imagine, so here, here is the original cave surface,
I mean, the surface of the bottom of the cave.
So we are less than a metre between the top and the floor,
so you're crawling, crawling on your hands and knees,
just like the animals that you're going to now try to summon.
Oh!
We have a horse. Look at that.
It's almost smiling.
This is incredible.
And then, look at the mane, with all the hairs kind of standing up,
like, to attention, and then those ears,
all folded forward.
He's very aware, very alert,
and then those veins and lines in the neck.
This is fantastic.
Using a sharpened piece of flint and scratching into the walls
around them, these Ice Age artists conjured the essence of an animal.
Phew!
There's so much here.
Just hardly a surface that hasn't been...
Just a web.
Look, look, look.
Because it's fantastic, there's just so much energy
in just the making of the lines, whether they found a form or not,
and it's almost like they want to, sort of,
express the energy they're feeling,
because there's marks everywhere on these walls.
Look, just everywhere.
There is the famous lion.
But isn't that magnificent?
Just that feeling of the profile of the head,
and then this forward, like, motion of the right leg,
as it moves in a way out of the inchoate,
the unseen, into visibility.
I must say, I'm changing my mind about what we're looking at here.
We can see that there are, yes, emergent figures,
but actually it's the act of drawing itself that is the thing.
And maybe something comes, and maybe it doesn't.
You just feel like the energy of legs moving,
legs moving through, through the grass.
We've seen legs now, already, of horses, and then that last
lion, and then... GASPS
Ah, look, look, look, look!
This deer, is it a reindeer? Yes.
Look, bending down to drink.
Can you see that? Can you see that?
There's the lovely curved antlers,
and then you can see the brow above,
and even, is that a tongue?
Do you see? Just there, tongue,
coming out from the lower lip.
This is so gentle, isn't it?
So empathic.
You could spend all day here just dreaming with this wall.
It's like you're reading, you know, these are marks left by a human,
but they're part, then, of the rock, and it's like the rock now
is a place where you can dream and bring forth these,
yeah, these presences.
It's just, it's like this is a kind of,
you know, cathedral of memory, but also joy in living things.
But then, you know, things come, and they go.
These engravings were made between 14 and 16,000 years ago.
Just think about what that means.
This was a time before farming,
before the invention of metal tools...
..and the people who made these were foragers,
hunter-gatherers.
But this cave shows us that making art was something vitally important
to Ice Age people.
Again and again, they came here, scratching and marking,
over and over, to leave traces that have lasted for millennia.
I mean, in a way I think I come out thinking
how wide this need to leave an inscription and a trace is.
All of those abstract ideas about time
just totally cease to matter.
There's an absolute presence, absolute presentness
and absolute presence in there, and...
..that is art of now.
I mean, it's absolutely extraordinary how immediate it is.
When cave paintings were first discovered in Europe,
more than a century ago, an idea took hold that they must
have somehow helped us to hunt and kill the animals
that they represented.
But that isn't what I see here.
There is a cave further up the Vezere Valley
called Font-de-Gaume...
..which I think shows that Ice Age artists
had a very different intention.
This is one of the most touching images that we have.
We already saw a reindeer drinking.
Now we have a male and female in this incredibly intimate moment.
The male standing above, and painted in black,
and the female, this wonderful smudge of ochre.
So there is the the eye, eye.
Here is the ridge, there's the eyebrow,
here's the nose, here's the tongue,
here's the bottom of the head,
and then there's the bottom of the neck,
here's the front leg,
there's the back leg, and then these magnificent horns.
And then, here, here is...
Here is the red deer.
And you can see its head very closely.
There's his eye...
..and it's painted and engraved, but very, very gently.
The connection between the two is so gentle.
This tongue just touching, seemingly, the horns of the female.
The kind of conventional view is that cavemen were primitive,
and everything that they had to do with was to do with the hunt,
and killing, and it's through images like this, and the one
that we looked at earlier, in Combarelles,
it's completely the opposite.
You know, I think we just have to give up on the idea
of the hairy caveman being a brute.
This is so moving, I mean, so tender, so...
..yeah, peaceful.
It seems to be about continuity.
We had to live by killing...
..and yet we saw that, in some way...
..these animals show us our better selves.
When we created the images in this valley,
there were perhaps 50,000 humans in all of Europe.
Far from being the dominant hunters, we were the vulnerable ones.
If you can imagine that you were standing at the edge of a valley,
and you heard this sound.
The sound of a million hooves
beating on the earth.
You'd hear it before you see it,
and then this wave of animal life would appear.
That rush, that feeling, that feeling of being surrounded
by a plethora of life forms, in which you were very small,
utterly dependent,
and they seem like the wind in the trees,
the water of a river,
to be closer to the heartbeat of the way things are.
You would want to become them,
you would want to be filled with that energy, spirit.
We've just seen, as it were, a monumental expression
of extreme delicacy.
This is art before narcissism, this is art dedicated to the fact
that we are part of a continuum of life.
We live in a time where we spend more time involved in our metalanguage...
..through screens, through, you know,
all the ways in which we, in a way,
redramatise our little hopes and fears.
Here is an unequivocal expression of how dependent
we are on all living beings.
But not all Ice Age art conveyed such tenderness.
200 miles away in the French Pyrenees is a cave called Niaux,
famous for a very different kind of imagery.
I'm going to see it for myself for the first time.
The paintings at Niaux were made between 12 and 14,000 years ago...
..so the people who made them would have walked through here barefoot,
carrying a flame.
Being this deep inside a cave alters your perception.
You become aware of your own breathing, of your heartbeat,
of your footsteps.
Every bump and hollow has the potential to spring to life.
Were they led here by something sacred or spiritual
that brought them deep inside this alien environment
in order to make art?
It's surely not chance that most of the images in this cave are found
half a mile from the daylight, in a space called the Salon Noir.
The assurance of this drawing is extraordinary.
In a way, this is the closest that I've seen
to really sketching in the, in the caves.
It's somebody who's very assured of their own ability
to evoke an animal.
You know, a single line... Shck, shck, shck, shh-sh.
Shk, psh, whew, psh, shoo, t-shock.
What interests me, I think, is the degree to which
the main images in this hall
seem to be associated with, erm, death.
Very, you know, brutally executed,
and there's something very impressive about that.
But, at the same time, I don't get any...the same sense of sympathy
that we've had before.
My theory is crumbling in the face of the truth of this,
which is, you know, this seems to me to be more about
our species' sense of superiority, and the right,
the right to end the lives of other living things.
So it is sad.
I mean, when I see an image like that, I think, yeah, that's sad.
That is the end of the life of a fine creature.
So the sympathy, empathy, identification, love...
..isn't here, for me.
Certainly, this is the same hand.
I think we've found the Paleolithic Picasso.
He is, you know, he's bloody pleased with himself,
or herself, you know, bloody good at it. I can, I can...
I can command the image of a bison,
and furthermore...
..tell you that I'm going to kill it.
Well, it's a bit like Picasso's attitude to women,
and I don't, I don't care for Picasso, erm...
..because he was a predator.
And I see these images as, in a way, these two things -
the egotism of a human
that feels that they are in control
and the egotism of an artist who feels that he can command the image,
and, in commanding the image, commands the creature.
It doesn't open the valves of my sympathy for life.
Quite the reverse.
And that's shocking, and sad.
Like so much that has been made since,
this is art in which man is asserting his own superiority.
Art is a litmus test of our values,
I mean, it just tells us what we care about,
it tells us what makes us feel more alive.
I think that's what art's supposed to do, make us feel more alive,
but, often, art is sidestepped into making us feel more tasteful,
more powerful, more rich, more special.
And seeing this has made me re-evaluate this journey.
I came here because I wanted to reconnect with what art was
for our ancestors, and what it can still be, at its best.
But, here, rather than discovering how art began,
the images inside the cave felt like the beginning of the end.
I think that what I'm looking for might lie further back in time.
The next cave I'm going to see is as far away in time
from the artists of Niaux as they are from us in the present day.
We're going back 28,000 years before the present.
I've come here to the Lot valley, 100 miles north of Niaux...
..because there's a cave here that contains one of the earliest
paintings of animals found anywhere in Europe.
The cave of Pech Merle was discovered in 1922 by two local boys
Just like at Niaux, the cave itself sets your imagination running.
Again, there's something extraordinary, to me,
about the response to just the sheer physicality
of the space, with these...
These are like great, you know...
If we were in the belly of a whale, and he'd just eaten his breakfast,
and this was, like, great big mouthfuls of something,
you know, you feel, somehow, in here that we're being privileged
to be somewhere very special.
What these two boys who first came here discovered
was an extraordinary painting.
Extraordinary in its beauty,
but also because it wasn't created with a paintbrush,
or by scratching lines into the rock,
it was created by human breath.
Prehistorian Michel Lorblanchet
has spent many years studying this painting
to try and unlock the secrets it contains.
Here is the panel, the dotted horses panel, which...
All the paintings have been made with the spitting technique.
No brushes? No brushes, no.
In fact, the artist, by his breath,
he projected himself with the breath,
with his breath onto the rock,
and in this beautiful figure,
beautiful painting of horses.
The man who did the drawing did six hand stencils,
and after the hands, the black dots were drawn.
There are more than 200 black dots.
But the spots go beyond the horse and below the horse
and around the horse, so what's happening? Of course. Of course.
Ah, yes, here the dots are not the fur of the animals,
of the horses, they are just geometric marks.
So they are a kind of emanation of a horse,
not the horse itself. Of course.
So this is the spirit of the horse.
In your, in your interpretation, this is also an image of life.
Yes.
Everything in here is like, it's becoming, you know,
you look in every direction, and you see, yeah,
these forms that are so complex, and, yeah, magical.
This is natural, the temple of the nature,
and it's a good expression, I think.
Nature is already a sort of artist, nature itself,
and so man is invited to do the same.
He is a member, a part of the nature himself.
Michel's insight into this painting is borne of experience.
He realised that in order to truly inhabit the mind of the prehistoric
artist, he must dedicate himself to recreating their art,
and their methods, bringing him closer to the art
at the moment of its making.
SPITS
SERIES OF RAPID SHORT PUFFS
In the 1970s, Michel was researching the painting techniques
of the Aboriginal Australians...
..and he realised that some of the Ice-Age art in Europe
appeared to have been made using the same methods.
And he set about trying to recreate the whole frieze
of the horses at Pech Merle.
It gave him an unexpected insight
into the ritual involved in the process of painting.
Painting is to project oneself onto the rock...
..by the breath.
So the breath must be symbolic.
Breathing the painting is something very personal.
The paintings become part of yourself,
which is projected onto the rock.
And so I had the feeling that these paintings are deeply
spiritual actions in the cave.
Et voila. C'est, c'est encore plus d'energie necessaire!
Non, mais c'est...
It's really impressive, honestly, Michel, I...
It's completely changed my feeling about what I'm seeing in the caves.
Ah, yes. Because I thought it was like...
IMITATES SPITTING One. No, no... And not at all.
No. So it's... No, no, it doesn't work...
So it's a really long time...
Yes, it needs, yes, for almost three-quarters of an hour
to get to a true, a good hand stencil.
And so this is like really a moment of...
..complete concentration and persistence.
That's right, that's right, that's right, that's right.
And, also, in the cave, it's necessary to have light,
because the painter can't hold the light.
Yes, because you have to do... Somebody has to hold the light for him.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. You know what I mean? Beside of him. Yeah.
Unless he lit a fire by the wall.
Near the wall.
The process seems so elemental.
They brought fire into the cave for light,
and the charcoal the fire made gave them pigment.
It's a bit like a bassoon player, like this...
You really have to, like, constrict your lips,
and, you know...
Oh, that's, that's...
Unfortunately, the natural patches here are disturbing...
Already. No, but it's very... I think that's very beautiful.
The way the hand appears out of the rock.
Yeah, that's right. That's right.
I think that's what makes these handprints unbearably poignant.
In some way, we know that rocks don't change.
In the scale of human life, geology is a constant...
..and if we want to reflect on our own mortality,
and the fact that we're here to die, whereas rocks are here to stay...
..we do this thing of touching the rock...
..and we make that touch eternal by blowing pigment around it.
In a way, it's not the handprint,
it is the place that a hand once was,
and that's very, you know... To me, that's very deep,
for my work.
My work is absolutely a continuation of that concern
with leaving your trace.
It could be a shadow, a footprint in the snow,
They're all an attempt to say, you know,
we exist in time,
we're subject to time...
..and we will not have time quite soon.
But how long ago did we first understand these ideas,
and was that when art began?
I've crossed the border into Spain to come to a cave that we now know
contains some of the oldest art made by homo sapiens anywhere in the world.
I want to come here because this could be as close as I can get
to the moment when we first understood who we are as humans,
when we began to make art expressing our own mortality.
This line of 86 red dots is art stripped back to its very essence.
So beautiful, because this is about interval.
This is as if we are beginning to understand time.
In other words, we can determine interval,
we can mark a moment followed by a moment.
And it reminds me of being a kid going to school,
and with a stick, tapping on the railings as I walked
down Fitzjohns Avenue.
That's the thought.
Every time we come into the caves, we feel the same thing,
that this is immediate, this could have been made yesterday.
It is present, it makes us more present in the time
of our own movement through these spaces.
And it's so moving.
We always ask that question, what does this mean?
What does this represent?
And it's escaped from that kind of meaning and that kind of picturing.
This is just saying, here, now, here,
now, here, now.
And that's about as good as art gets.
But this is not the whole story.
In the last ten years, new evidence has come to light
that suggests that there is art that is much,
much older than this.
When modern humans, homo sapiens, arrived in this part of Europe
42,000 years ago, a now-extinct species of human,
Neanderthals, had already been living here
for hundreds of thousands of years.
The classic image of Neanderthals is that they had inferior minds
and were not capable of the self-reflection it takes to make art.
But it turns out we may have underestimated our human cousins.
In 2012, a team led by Professor Alistair Pike
was experimenting with a new dating technique
to find ages for those cave paintings
that had been impossible to date before.
His initial research focused on an area of El Castillo
where red painted discs sit alongside another, now-familiar image.
So, this is the panel of hands.
And there are more than 40 hand stencils arranged on this wall.
They're quite ghostly, aren't they?
It's a person, isn't it? You see the absence of hand. Yeah.
And the significance of that is, you can't make one of these accidentally.
So, if you were to put your hand in some red mud
and fall against the cave wall, you'll leave the handprint,
but it may not have been intentional,
whereas you can't make this accidentally.
It was a deliberate act of creating a hand stencil.
And you can see that many of these hand stencils and red discs
that are on here are covered in this white substance,
which is calcium carbonate.
The same material that's formed when stalagmites and stalactites form.
And because it's forming on top of some of these hand stencils,
that gives us a minimum age, nearly 37,000 years for this hand.
Goodness. And just to the right of it is a red disc,
rather like the ones you were looking at in the corridor of discs.
And this is older than 40,800.
It's a matter of faith that we believe a disc is there!
THEY LAUGH
So, this calcite formed just after the arrival of modern humans.
But there's an unknown amount of time between the painting
being done and the calcite forming.
So, on the one hand, this red disc, and possibly the hands,
which we think were made around the same time,
were amongst the earliest paintings that modern humans did
when they arrived in Europe.
Or if there was a time delay of more than a few thousand years
between the painting and the formation of the calcite,
then this red disc must have been made by a Neanderthal.
If it's true that Neanderthals were making art,
it changes all our ideas about how art began.
To find out for sure, Alistair took more samples
from calcium deposits on other images in caves across Spain.
These are some pictures that we took when we were taking samples
for dating from Maltravieso cave in Caceres in the west of Spain.
And this cave has an unusually high number of red hand stencils in it.
And we found a hand stencil in here that had calcite on it
that showed that it dated to older than 66,000 years. Wow.
Now, this is 25,000 years before humans arrived in Spain,
so there's absolutely no question that this must have been made by a Neanderthal.
With this extraordinary research, Alistair Pike and his team
have reset the clock on when art began...
..pushing it back by 25,000 years.
And if our cousins the Neanderthals were making art,
it opens up the possibility that art goes much further back
in our human family tree,
and we were not the first but simply the most recent type
of human to harness the power of art.
So, you now have a picture of modern humans arriving in a Europe
where the caves are already painted.
So, Alistair, does that mean that the impetus for making art,
in some senses, is homo sapiens' response to the traces
of Neanderthal art that were already in the caves?
Well, if you only look at the European evidence,
you might come to that conclusion.
But, in fact, there have been some recent amazing discoveries
on the other side of the world that suggest a very different
picture for understanding the origin of human art.
Thousands of miles away, on the island of Sulawesi in Indonesia,
another group of scientists have made an extraordinary discovery.
They've found art here made by human beings who'd had no contact
with the people of Europe, who were living in a place
where no Neanderthals had been before them.
And, yet, they've found evidence that people started to paint
in the caves in these mountains at almost exactly the same time
as the first humans were painting in Europe.
Were these two isolated groups of people motivated to make art
at the same time for the same reason?
geochemist Maxime Aubert.
Hello, Antony. Max. Maxime.
How are you? I'm very well. Lovely to see you.
Me too. Goodness. Welcome to Leang Timpuseng.
There is something here in this cave that Maxime thinks I should see.
GASPS
Wow.
We were thousands and thousands of miles away,
looking at other hands,
and here we are, in a completely different culture,
different latitude, different side of the world.
The same idea of leaving a mark.
What is it that changed in our hominine minds
that made us feel that this kind of thing was necessary?
I find this really incredibly moving.
You know, this is, this is about, on the one hand, you know,
you're invited to put your hand and say,
"I've just high-fived somebody from 30,000 years ago."
And, then, on the other, no, it's the absolute...
It's saying, here is the world.
Here is what will be,
long after the person who made it has gone.
But also long after I who come after him will be gone. Yeah.
It's apparently, like, 30 years ago, this whole thing was painted.
The whole ceiling of this cave was completely painted,
so there's still some painting on that side.
And this has all collapsed. It's all gone now.
That's the old rock face, and when it's white, it's the new rock face.
And you can see... There is something there.
The bits of the painting that went through the rock, like the old surface.
But this has all collapsed. This is all gone.
So this is not the same thing as the cave in France,
where it's deep and it's cold, but, here, it's really wet and humid,
so the further deep you go inside the cave,
the more humid it is.
Increasing pollution over the last 30 years means that this art
is disappearing, just as its significance is being understood.
For Maxime, this is most serious when it affects art
that is unique to this area.
If you come maybe here and look on your back,
and look at this pig here, so, you can see there's a really large
animal painting of a pig.
And you can see the legs there. Yeah. And you can see the hoof, you know. Yeah.
And then all of the body here, the head, and there's the nose.
Yeah. And you can see the snout and the mouth, all the details.
Is this done with a finger, or is this done with a brush?
There's some really details that would be hard to do,
I think, with a finger. Look at the mouth here. Yeah, yeah.
It's really fine details.
What are these strange, balloon-like animals?
Yeah, well, we think it's a babirusa.
That's a type of pig, like, a wild pig around here.
But it's pretty rare now.
The significance of these animal paintings lies not just
in the choice of animal that they painted.
Maxime is taking me to a cave called Leang Tempuseng,
where he found a painting of a babirusa
that brought this art to the attention of the world.
All right, Antony, so this is it.
Oh, yeah. So, here we have a pig, a babirusa.
How incredible. There's a hand stencil on the right-hand side.
I don't know if you can see, but there is a little sample
that we took out on the left-hand side.
Oh, yeah. On the little finger. Yeah.
And then that provided us a minimum age of about 40,000 years old
for that hand stencil.
And on the babirusa here, we took a sample,
and that gave us a minimum age
for the pig of 35,000,
so that's the oldest figurative art in the world.
I mean, this claim is that this is the first,
as it were, referential, representational figure work in the world.
And that's, you know, that's an extraordinary thing.
So what do you put that down to?
Maybe, like, when the modern humans arrived here on this island,
this island's got lots and lots and lots of, like, specific species,
like, endemic species to this island.
So maybe when modern human arrived, they were just amazed to see
a different kind of, you know, animal they've never seen before,
and maybe that's how it became special to them. I like that idea.
Yeah, so this is, like, this is the way this landscape
expresses itself with this form. Maybe, yeah.
I like that. I like that. That makes a lot of sense to me.
It seems that while we were making dots and hand stencils in Europe,
people here had realised that they could draw a picture
of something, and those first pictures were of animals.
Perhaps because they embodied this new landscape,
or perhaps for reasons that we do not yet understand.
An archaeological dig nearby is trying to find evidence
about the role of art in the lives of these early people.
The team is led by Maxime's colleague, Adam Brumm.
When the Ice-Age artists came here from Africa,
they were seeing for the first time a totally different animal world,
and, so, I think, really, we could be seeing,
I guess, an evolution or a transformation in human spirituality
and religion in terms of the level of spiritual connectedness to the animal world.
The thing we have to remember here in Sulawesi is,
this is really uncharted territory.
I mean, you've got to remember that the Ice Age art in Europe is something that's been knownfor...
Generations of intensive research has been done.
Our Indonesian colleagues have done an incredible job here documenting
and recording and discovering all these sites,
but it's only four years ago we showed that these images are some of the oldest in the world.
And now we really need, now we've made that the initial breakthrough,
we really need to understand more about this art.
It had always been thought that this urge to create such
incredible art had emerged in Europe 40,000 years ago,
but is it now a matter of eventually we can join up the dots, so to speak,
the thousands of kilometres separating this part of the world
from the old world, from Europe?
I believe that it's, you know, it's really just a matter of time
until we do see some evidence for a similar sort of art being created
at around the same time between here and in Europe.
Today and the last days have just really...
..opened my mind to the fact that we are looking, really, at a global picture now.
What we're seeing is - and we're going to see more and more -
the fact is there's very little from Africa at this age.
That's simply because we haven't looked for it,
or we haven't looked for it hard enough.
There's nothing, or very little, from India.
We haven't looked hard, either, there.
So, this story of the earliest art will go on changing,
and will go on getting deeper, and will go on astonishing us.
We now know that art began earlier than we'd ever thought before,
and that it was happening on opposite sides of the world.
But, for me, these discoveries don't answer the most important question of all.
Why do we make art?
Because the tradition of cave art came to an end in Europe
and Indonesia so long ago,
the answer may not lie here.
But there is one part of the world where cave and rock art
has continued to be made almost to the present.
Humans first came to Australia from Indonesia 60,000 years ago.
And it's here, in the Australian wilderness,
that I hope to find answers to the deepest mystery -
what art means to us.
This is the Kimberley in Western Australia.
This vast wilderness, three times the size of England,
is home to the most breathtaking variety of rock art anywhere in the world.
And it's art that some believe, although not yet definitively dated,
could be older than anything we've yet seen.
I'm joining a small team of scientists from the University
of Melbourne, who've come to take samples for further study.
This land belongs to the Balanggarra people.
Their spiritual beliefs govern their relationship with the land,
with plants and animals, and with the art here.
So we need to be purified in a smoking ceremony
before we can visit their sacred sites.
The art here is not hidden deep inside caves.
But the landscape itself is so extreme
that much of the art has remained unknown to the wider world.
One of the traditional owners, Ado French,
is taking me to see a piece of art that was discovered only two days ago.
And trying to get to it, you can understand why.
Oh, boy! This is the real thing.
This is absolutely magnificent.
So, this is a life-size kangaroo, mid-leap.
It's just fantastic.
Really, really, this is a moment of lived time captured
through exactly what we were finding in France -
that feeling of being the animal.
It's just fantastic.
Right arm open, you know, sensing space.
But the main thing is, this is totally alive.
And it's painted with such assurance.
A single stroke from the haunches, from the shoulder blades
of the front arms, that runs, after being pressed...
If you had a fully loaded Chinese brush absolutely full of pigment,
you'd press it hard against the surface and then drag it
all the way to the beginning of the tail.
The whole thing is about...
..is about life.
About movement, about alert, aware, alive.
And it's...
Well...
I think this connects so powerfully with what we saw, I think...
..to some extent, in Sulawesi, but certainly in Font-de-Gaume.
Absolutely magnificent.
There's art of this quality absolutely everywhere here,
but what differentiates it from the art of Europe
is that it's broken free from that narrow palette of subjects
we've seen in France and Spain.
There are animal paintings, of course, but there is also art
that reflects the natural world in a way that we haven't seen before.
And nowhere is this more apparent than in the place that Ado has now brought me to.
That's fantastic.
GASPS
They're so delicate.
This is like some, like, Japanese,
delicate celebration of water, water plants.
Wonderful. And even the colouration is so lovely.
The yellow ochre inside the pod, and then these reaching...
..fine, fine leaves that come up out of the surface of the water.
It's really beautiful.
I'm starting to feel that the art here
is revealing a different relationship between man and nature
than in the paintings we saw in Europe.
Alongside beautiful images of plants and animals,
there are paintings of something hardly ever depicted in Europe.
Humans.
The main thinking about this transition between where we've been
and where we are now, here are human images,
but not just human images crudely painted as a sign,
but human images that celebrate a life,
a whole collective, communal life.
Across the Kimberley, we find paintings of human figures
swept up in ecstatic celebration.
In Europe, we painted animals because they embodied the qualities we lacked,
but in Australia, it seems, we're no longer jealous
of the collective vitality of the animals,
because we possess it ourselves.
We've come to rest on a ledge halfway between the ground and the sky,
and we're seeing an image that I can't help respond to
as a very positive and life affirming thing.
We've got two figures, one much darker than the other,
and it's almost like one is the shadow of the other,
and in this case, you know, the darker is actually the thing
that is projecting this lighter shadow on the back,
but they mirror each other almost perfectly.
There's a feeling of togetherness...
..but also, you know, just joy.
And it's an extraordinary thing, really,
if we started this journey with animals,
somehow in this suspended animation
that nevertheless conveyed a kind of feeling of conjuring of life,
here we have the same thing, but focused entirely on a human being,
and a very strong communicated sense of confidence,
of being in the world.
And at the moment where our species seems to be treading so heavily
on the face of this Earth, it's just lovely to come here
where there are no roads, there are no railways,
there are no pylons that stalk across the land.
It is truly a wilderness, and yet in that wilderness
are images of us in our native state as artists and human beings.
But alongside these new forms, there is a more familiar image
here too, one that shows us just how universal art is
in trying to understand our place in the world.
Here is something that speaks across all the continents
that we've looked at, or all the different geographies.
Here is a hand stencil almost identical to my hand size.
Here is the hand reaching out to us that we found in France,
we found in Sulawesi, and now here it is again.
It still strikes me as a complete miracle...
..that, spontaneously, it seems,
very separated communities of modern man found it necessary
to do this thing,
leave this sign of being in a particular place.
You know, for me, this journey, this journey, the journey of making this film...
..is in a way a journey about...
..the consistencies in this need...
..a human need to express,
in a way, the inexpressible.
All the things about life that are not to do simply
with the support of the body.
Art has always wanted to go beyond the horizon,
beyond the limit, and I think touch the...
That which cannot be, perhaps, logically explained
or transmitted in words.
The universality of this gesture,
of leaving a present absence that isn't the thumbprint,
it is simply the outline that registers a moment
of lived time against the truths of geological time,
and the need to do that has expressed itself
all over the surface of this planet.
The practice of painting in the caves of Europe
came to an end about 10,000 years ago.
Whatever need it had served was over.
But here in the Kimberley, rock art is still a part of spiritual life.
Ado's father Orgee has come to take us to a place
that is special to him and his people.
HE CALLS
According to their tradition, the spirit of the creation being lives here.
Orgee has to call out to introduce me
and seek permission to visit the site.
Oh, wow!
Wolara? Yes.
And tell me, what does Wolara look after?
Uh-huh.
How long ago - was it your father's father who painted this,
or even further back?
Further back. Further back. Yeah.
So, would you say this was an earlier time or a dreamtime
or - what is this early time?
Right. So that's older than 2,000 years?
Did your father bring you here? Yeah.
And his father brought him here?
Oh, what, that's your handprint?
You and your two brothers? Yes.
So, you were small? Yeah.
How old were you when you came?
And you made that by just putting your hand in red ochre?
So, Orgee, what would happen to your people if they couldn't
have access to these sites?
So these are really, like,
they show your past but they also show your future?
It's just so amazing that we, as it were,
do have a living connection with those that painted the painting.
And I think that's what makes this so special.
In a sense, it allows us to understand better
what we were seeing in Europe,
because I think there is still a connection with the earth,
with the topography, with the landscape, the flora, the fauna.
But, simply, you know, they have disappeared in Europe.
If this film of ours can convey anything, it's the sense
of this emergent truth that art was there right from the very beginning.
It doesn't matter whether it's an individual artist making something
only for themselves down the most inaccessible
little crack of a deep, deep cave, or these extraordinary celebratory
panels of the Kimberley.
This has reinforced for me something perhaps I always felt
but I'd never seen quite in this way,
and so repeatedly over so many thousands of miles,
that art is intrinsic to who we are.
But art is probably our better part.
And that in some way when uncaptured...
..by political or economic interests,
it expresses a joy in being.
A connection with all living beings.
An awareness of...
..the is-ness of the palpable world.
But the absolute and utter need
of the imaginative to join it,
mark it and in that marking,
register our extraordinary ability to reflect on existence.
It's easy to think that art is an extra,
that it's an add-on, that it is only to be pursued
by those with the leisure or the money and the, in a way, idleness to pursue it.
But it's very, very clear that actually it's best to think of it
the other way around.
That it's the art that makes us.
Through doing it, seeing it, participating in it in some way,
we become fully ourselves.