蜜芽传媒

David Attenborough visits Lascaux in France to look at cave paintings created during the ice age some 15,000 years ago. No one knows why human beings painted the walls of caves in Spain and France with designs like these. Whatever reason they had to crawl into the inky blackness lit only by tiny flickering lamps, it surely could not have been just a trivial one. Almost all the animals represented are those that were hunted for food, so an obvious explanation is that painting was part of magic designed to bring success in hunting or to maintain the fertility of the herds. The animal that dominates this cave in Lascaux is not the reindeer, the ibex or even the horse, but the great wild bull. These giant cattle called aurochs stood at over six feet at the shoulder, weighed a tonne and some were painted larger than life size.