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Where and when did the “human spark” first ignite? In the caves of France, where 30,000-year-old paintings adorn the walls? Or at a much earlier time — and on another continent?
In the caves of the Dordogne region of France, host Alan Alda
witnesses the spectacular paintings and carvings that date back
some 30,000 years, artwork that archeologists once thought to be
the first record of people with minds like ours. When this art was
created, Europe had already been peopled for hundreds of thousands
of years by Neanderthals. Alda discovers, from visits to sites
where Neanderthals once lived, that they were tenacious and
resourceful, but they produced no art and employed a stone tool
technology that changed little over millennia. The people who
painted the caves, our ancestors, were strikingly different,
possessed of the "human spark," capable not only of art but of
innovative technology and symbolic communication. Alda asks: Where
and when did the human spark first ignite? In these caves, as
archeologists have long believed? Or at a much earlier time - and
on another continent?
