I found the movie The Cave of Forgotten Dreams extremely interesting. It was a bit trippy at times especially with the tap dancers – that came out of left field. But the overall message and the scenes of the cave was really spectacular.

When I first think about a cave, I picture a hole in the wall about the size of our classroom or smaller. I never would have imagined a cave 1,300 feet from end to end! The cave was almost like an entire city for it’s dwellers and not just a nook that they slept in as I had first thought. It is unimaginable the feeling of discovering that cave and its monstrous size. The way they discover the cave was totally opposite than expected as well. They said they were looking for caves by feeling wafts of air coming through cracks in the rocks. They are not, as I shallowly believed, easily noticeable holes in a rock wall. Even though the cave is so big, I think it is really interesting to find bear footprints inside along with skulls of different animals. I wonder if those animals lived in there and were a potential danger to the people who made the paintings. It doesn’t sound like they found any human remains in the cave so either the bears didn’t kill anyone or the other people disposed of their bodies in a burial.

Throughout their journey inside the cave, they had to walk on those skinny railways in order to preserve the calcium floor. Obviously they didn’t have those when they first discovered the cave so there had to be some human traffic in their after the last cave paintings 32,000 years ago. They also closed off access to the cave when they discovered the paintings and how important it was so there wouldn’t be a huge amount of people in there anyway. It makes me question the need to build the walkways and screw into the floor which I think would be much more detrimental than some like treading.

It was interesting to learn that the paintings were calcified over and preserved the paintings from weathering and normal decay from age. It was almost like a picture from history for the discoverers! However, the one thing that I found most interesting came from their explanation of the man who made the palm prints. They stated that it was easy to follow his artwork because he had a crooked little finger. I also have a crooked little finger. I don’t know how common it is but I thought that was really cool to hear that people as far back as life has been documented had the same abnormality I do!