What I Learned From A Dark Cave About Our Oldest Urge
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Welcome to What I Learned From… “A cave has two great things to teach you: Light is sacred; silence is to integrate with eternity!” — Mehmet Murat ildan What I Learned From …It started with a dog named Robot falling into a hole underneath an uprooted tree. Marcel Ravidat was just 18 years old, out exploring the woods with his dog in 1940, when his canine companion took an unexpected detour. Ravidat returned to the scene with three friends, Jacques Marsal, Georges Agnel, and Simon Coencas. The boys followed the tunnels down, thinking they had found a secret passage to a nearby manorhouse, but they found so much more. They found horses. And stags, bulls, bison, all galloping and leaping across the limestone walls. Life-sized and full of motion, thousands of figures were painted in sweeping black lines, ochre yellows, and iron red. The boys had accidentally uncovered Lascaux: a sprawling Stone Age gallery hidden deep in the earth, filled with paintings nearly 17,000 years old. Some of the animals are more than 15 feet long, crawling along chambers that stretch over 900 feet. It's been called the "Sistine Chapel of Prehistory" and honestly? Fair comparison, if not a little understated. These paintings weren't made in places anyone would casually stumble upon. They're tucked far inside the cave system, in total darkness. The artists brought scaffolding, dug holes into the cave walls to secure it, and lit lamps of animal fat to see more clearly. They ground pigments from minerals, and used everything from fingers to primitive brushes to hollow bones (an early kind of spray paint in which the painter would outline a figure, suck up a little pigment, and blow it directly onto the wall in a burst of color.) This wasn’t some “Hey, I’ve got five minutes, let me doodle something on the wall” situation. This was intentionally crafted. But why would they want to do that? No one knows! At least not for sure. There are theories, of course.
Or maybe, as archaeologist April Nowell puts it, they were simply made because early humans felt the need to: “People have this innate need to express themselves artistically, and prehistoric people were no different.” Whatever the reason, they did it. Repeatedly, and across generations and continents, because cave paintings do not only appear at Lascaux. Yes, there are over 350 similar sites across France and Spain. But if you zoom out farther, the picture gets even more interesting. In Sulawesi, Indonesia, there are cave paintings of pigs, dated more than 45,000 years ago. In South Africa’s Blombos Cave, researchers found cross-hatched designs carved into ochre some 73,000 years ago. Which makes you wonder: Why don’t we hear about those as much? Well, Lascaux had better timing. It was discovered in the mid-20th century in a country ready to rally around cultural pride after WWII. It’s visually stunning, massive in scale, painterly in style, and easy to mythologize. It was also much easier to access than a cave tucked into an Indonesian island or a South African archeological dig. But here's the real twist: none of these sites are where art began. They're just where we found proof. Anthropologists talk about this moment in our evolution as “the mind’s big bang”, a time when symbolic life burst into view: music, language, tools, rituals, art. Some say it happened around 50,000 years ago. Others argue it was a slower burn, and that Africa holds clues to a much earlier emergence of creativity. Either way, the moment we started imagining the world, we started making art. That urge — to represent, to record, to express — is deeply human. I can’t even draw convincing stick figures. In 2009, my mum got a new office setup and my sister and I thought it would be funny to “make her art” like we used to as kids. My masterpiece? A lopsided figure in what I meant to be a dress, but I forgot to draw fabric below the hips. When I posted it online, the top comment was: “Geez Elisa, put some pants on!” My friends are good. And I was trying. Truly, I was trying. Which only makes the Cro-Magnon murals more mind-blowing. These people had no written language, no metal tools, no natural light…and yet they created work that still stops us in our tracks 17,000 years later. Maybe it was a ritual. Maybe it was education. Maybe it was art for art’s sake. Whatever it was, they did it anyway. Creativity isn’t some modern indulgence. It’s not the icing on top of life, it’s part of the structure. We’ve always felt this need to share, even if we don’t necessarily know why we need to. So if you’re feeling the pull to write and create something today, even if it’s messy and no one reads it, remember this: You’re not wasting time. You’re doing something ancient that is wired into your very DNA. Grab the bone tube, light the lamp, and get to work. The walls of Lascaux remind us that we’ve always needed to create, and always will. Previously in This Writing Life …All the good stuff you were meant to see but probably didn’t.
I’ve just started recording the archive, and I’ll be catching up fast (this week’s essay will be added soon!) You can start with a 7-day free trial on the lowest tier, and get other perks at different tiers: behind-the-scenes exclusives, creative scraps from my Graveyard, early access to tools and workshops, video interviews with fellow creatives, and live Q&As. Now that it’s finally live, come check out what we’re doing over on Patreon with The Forge at CYC 🔥 Worth Reading …The pieces that made me pause last week.
Notes from the Masters …Craft advice that holds up, straight from the ones who lived it. “Where you stumble, there lies your treasure. The very cave you are afraid to enter turns out to be the source of what you are looking for. The damned thing in the cave, that was so dreaded, has become the center.” ― Joseph Campbell, The Power of Myth Prompted: Your Move …A spark from this week’s essay. Use it to write your own. Trace your own ‘mind’s big bang.’ When did you first feel the pull to shape experience into story? Glossary of The Forgotten …Because life’s too chaotic for bland words. Graven [GRAY-vuhn] (adj.) — Carved or deeply impressed; marked with intention and permanence. From Old English grafan (“to dig or chisel”), it is also related to the German graben and Dutch graven. They all descend from the Proto-Indo-European root grebh- ("to scratch, scrape, or mark.") Before we wrote, we carved. Because before we knew what art was, we knew we needed to make it stay. Sorta synonyms: etched, ineffaceable, embossed Use it for: the ritual permanence of cave art, a promise that feels carved into memory, prose that is sculpted rather than written. Want to read more in-depth Glossary entries? Catch up on the archives and find this week’s newest one. Try This Thing …No promises. Just a potentially brilliant shortcut or two. Think you can't afford that reading list? Think again. ThriftBooks delivers the joy of reading with the world's best-used book prices and free shipping over $15. The Final Chuckle …Serious writing deserves unserious endings. But at least I still look cute. ‘Til next time ~ Elisa PS — Last week we didn’t send out a WILF for a simple reason…the essay wasn’t ready. While I want to hit deadlines and commitments to you, I also don’t want to send half-baked babbling just to check a box. I promise, when I send you an email, please know I put in time and effort to make it worth it. |