15-minute documentary film.

Cantering across the stone galleries of cave walls, sensitively rendered in charcoal and ochre hues, are life-like renditions of the many species with whom Upper Paleolithic peoples shared their landscape, forty thousand to ten thousand years ago: massive aurochs and bison, inquisitive horses and ibex, jousting mammoth and rhinoceri. Whereas today our art gallery walls are filled with endless canvases of human subjects, portraits and history paintings, when we look at our earliest recorded art, its subject matter shows something quite different, rather less narcissistic. It’s not about us, it’s all about animals.

This short film looks at the parietal and portable art of Europe to explore why animals mattered so much to these peoples. It reveals that our modern bias of evaluating animals in purely utilitarian terms prevents our understanding the radically different ways that early humans might have perceived their landscape and the animals who inhabited it. It is their very art that communicates these priorities to us across time and space, reminding us of a time when we engaged with animals as a community of equals.

(click full-screen for high-definition)

This film won Honourable Mention for Best Undergraduate Podium Presentation at the Currents in Anthropology research fair March 13th, 2015. View film script and research citations PDF here.