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Today we're doing something different.
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Our friend John Green will read a story from his podcast, "The Anthropocene Reviewed".
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We hope you enjoy it and we'll be back with a regular video,
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Soon.
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So if you've ever been or had a child, you will likely already be familiar with hand stencils.
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They were the first figurative art made by both our kids somewhere between the ages of 2 and 3.
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My children spread the fingers of one hand out across a piece of paper, and then with the help of a parent,
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traced their five fingers.
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I remember my son's face as he lifted his hand and looked absolutely
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shocked to see the shape of his hand still on the paper - a semi permanent record of himself.
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I am extremely happy that my children are no longer 3
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and yet to look at their little hands from those early artworks is to be inundated with a strange,
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soul splitting joy.
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Those pictures remind me that they are not just growing up, but also growing away from me, running toward their own lives.
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But of course that's meaning I am applying to their hand stencils and that complicated
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relationship between art and its viewers is never more fraught than when we are looking deeply into the past.
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In September of 1940, an 18 year old mechanic named Marcel Ravidat
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was walking his dog Robot in the countryside of southwestern France, when the dog disappeared down a hole.
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Robot eventually returned, but the next day Ravidat went to the spot with three friends to explore the hole and
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after quite a bit of digging they discovered a cave with walls covered with paintings, including over
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900 paintings of animals: horses, stags, bison and also species that are now extinct, including a woolly rhinoceros.
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The paintings were astonishingly detailed and vivid with
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red, yellow and black paint made from pulverized mineral pigments that were usually blown through a narrow tube,
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possibly a hollowed bone, unto the walls of the cave.
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It would eventually be established that these artworks were at least 17,000 years old.
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Two of the boys who visited the cave that day were so profoundly moved by the art they saw,
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that they camped outside the cave to protect it for over a year.
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After World War II the French government took over protection of the site and the cave was open to the public in 1948.
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When Picasso saw the cave paintings on a visit that year he reportedly said,
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''We have invented nothing.''
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There are many mysteries at Lascaux. Why, for instance, are there no paintings of reindeer,
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which we know were the primary source of food for the Paleolithic humans who lived in that cave?
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Why were they so much more focused on painting animals than painting human forms?
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Why are certain areas of the cave filled with images, including pictures on the ceiling that required the building of scaffolding to create,
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while other areas have only a few paintings?
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And were the paintings spiritual -- "here are our sacred animals"?
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Or were they practical -- "Here is a guide to some of the animals that might kill you"?
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Aside from the animals, there are nearly a thousand abstract signs and shapes
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we cannot interpret, and also several "negative hand stencils" as they are known by art historians.
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These are the paintings that most interest me.
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They were created by pressing one hand with fingers splayed against the wall of the cave and then blowing pigment,
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leaving the area around the hand painted.
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Similar hand stencils have been found in caves around the world, from Indonesia to Spain to
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Australia to the Americas to Africa.
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We have found these memories of hands from 15 or 30 or even 40 thousand years ago.
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These hand stencils remind us of how different life was in the distant past.
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Amputations likely from frostbite are common in Europe.
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And so you often see negative hand stencils with three or four fingers. And life was short and difficult.
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As many as a quarter of women died in childbirth; around 50% of children died before the age of five.
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But they also remind us that the humans of the past were as human as we are.
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Their hands indistinguishable from ours.
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These communities hunted and gathered and there were no large caloric surpluses.
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So every healthy person would have had to contribute to the acquisition of food and water, and yet somehow
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they still made time to create art.
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Almost as if art isn't optional for humans.
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We see all kinds of hands stenciled on cave walls,
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children and adults, but almost always the fingers are spread.
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Like my kids' hand stencils.
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I'm no Jungian.
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But it's fascinating and a little strange that so many Paleolithic humans,
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who couldn't possibly have had any contact with each other,
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created the same paintings the same way --
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paintings that we are still making.
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But then again, what the Lascaux art means to me is likely very different from what it meant to the people who made it.
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Some academics theorized that the hand stencils were part of hunting rituals.
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Then there's always the possibility that the hand was just a convenient model situated at the end of the wrist.
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To me, though,
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the hand stencils at Lascaux say, "I was here." They say, "You are not new."
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And because they are negative prints surrounded by red pigment, they also looked to me like something out of a horror movie.
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Like ghostly hands reaching up from some bloody background.
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They remind me that, as Alice Walker wrote, "All history is current."
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The Lascaux cave has been closed to the public for many years now.
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Too many contemporary humans breathing inside of it led to the growth of mold and lichens, which has damaged some of the art.
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Just the act of looking at something can ruin it, I guess.
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But tourists can still visit an imitation cave called Lascaux II, in which the artwork has been
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meticulously recreated.
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Humans making fake cave art to save real cave art may feel like peak Anthropocene behavior.
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But I have to confess that even though I am a jaded and cynical
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semi-professional reviewer of human activity,
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I actually find it overwhelmingly hopeful, that four teenagers and a dog named Robot
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discovered a cave with 17,000-year-old handprints, that the cave was so
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overwhelmingly beautiful that two of those teenagers devoted themselves to its protection.
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And that when we humans became a danger to that caves' beauty, we agreed to stop going.
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Lascaux is there. You cannot visit.
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You can go to the fake cave we've built, and see nearly identical hand stencils. But you will know
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this is not the thing itself,
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but a shadow of it.
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This is a handprint,
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but not a hand.
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This is a memory that you cannot return to.
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All of which makes the cave very much like the past it represents.
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We hope you enjoyed this video even if it was different.
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Check out John Green's podcast, "The Anthropocene Reviewed", where he poetically reviews the human world we live in.
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John is a good friend of Kurzgesagt.
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In fact without his channel, Crash Course, that he and his brother Hank started years ago,
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Kurzgesagt would not exist, because it was the original inspiration for what we do today.
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And over the years, John and Hank have helped us in a multitude of ways, from advice to just being friends.
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So check out "The Anthropocene Reviewed" or any of their many channels.10474
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