Grotte de Chauvet
a.k.a. Chauvet Cave (Working Title)

Grotte de Chauvet is the first film to document the southern French cave of Chauvet, perhaps the most important archaeological find of our time, one that may forever alter out ideas about our ancestors' many thousands of years before religion or even race.   Have we at last found a glimpse of the very origins of modern humanity?  What may this tell us about who we are and what we may become? In December of 1994, three spelunkers crawling on their bellies into an uncharted cave in the rugged cliffs of France’s Ardeche region, found immense passages scattered with the bones of extinct cave bears, and walls that came alive with paintings of ancient fauna: rhinoceroses charging, a pride of lions hunting, bison in a herd, gentle horses with bowed heads, and even what appears to be a hyena. 

Later, it would be confirmed that these were the oldest cave paintings ever to be discovered anywhere. 32,000 plus years before the present, nearly twice as long as Lascaux, these artists used shading or even the contours of the rock face to create volume, as if like Michelangelo 1,500 generations later, they too were “freeing” the figure from the stone.  Seeing these paintings one can only feel a profound sense of kinship with those who created them.  These paintings reveal far more about our distant past than bones and stone tools; they give us an unprecedented glimpse into the very soul of some of our most ancient ancestors.  Who were these artists 30 millennia before the Renaissance?   The fossil record tells us they were modern humans, called Cro-Magnons, so like us physically they would not attract attention on the streets of New York or Paris today.  And, in their paintings, we see ourselves at a moment of profound transition. 

For the first time our ancestors were creating sophisticated symbols, a capacity unique to our species.  We had become, in a sense, separate from nature, having begun our magnificent journey through the mind.  What might this art tell us about our ancestors’ capacity to use language, establish social hierarchies, and participate in economies, in short be modern humansAnd our dawning was the twilight of the Neanderthals.  Equipped with our unprecedented consciousness - expressed so beautifully in the cave of Chauvet - did we starve, drive, or hunt our closest remaining cousins into extinction?  Was the writing on the walls for the less adaptable, less imaginative Neanderthal as our uniquely creative species emerged? 

The documentary explores the beginnings of language and symbolic thought, the extinction of the Neanderthal, and the emergence of our unique human vision or consciousness.  For Grotte de Chauvet, Jed Riffe Films, LLC have assembled an incomparable team of consultants and interview subjects, including Ian Tattersall, Curator of the American Museum of Natural History in New York; Donald Johanson, Director of the Human Origins Research Project at the University of Arizona; Jean Clottes, the archeologist heading up the Chauvet research, and his collaborators French archaeologists Michel Alain Garcia, and Jean-Michel Geneste.

Grotte de Chauvet is being directed /produced by Jed Riffe (the director of Ishi the Last Yahi and Who Owns the Past?). Principal production began with the filming in Super 16MM of a key interview with Ian Tattersall author of Becoming Human in New York’s American Museum of Natural History.  Additional filming in HDTV is planned.