I had a chance to see Werner Hertzog’s famous documentary movie, Cave of Forgotten Dreams, (released April 2011), now available on Netflix. The film is about the Chauvet-Pont D’Arc cave in southern France and its cave paintings, older than the date fifteen thousand years ago given in The Urantia Book (The UB) as the height of prehistoric art. Latest information shows that usage of the cave has dates (not undisputed) that fall “into two groups, one centered around 27,000–25,000 BP (Gravettian culture) and the other around 32,000–30,000 BP (Aurignacian), obtained from radiocarbon dating of the charcoal on the wall, and on the floor of the cave.

   The UB tells us the cave artists were from the blue Sangik race. These UB terms, blue race and blue man, are similar to the European term “Blue Blood” that originated with royal families claiming Visigothic decent, also a term going back in some sources as far as 2,500 BCE. Blue bloods may represent Europe’s historical memory of Sangik heritage.

   “They had courage, but above all they were artists; the Adamic mixture suddenly accelerated creative imagination. The height of the blue man's art was about fifteen thousand years ago.” (80:3.7, Pg. 892) Rarely does The UB employ our anthropological terms, but the Archangel of Nebadon who authored paper 80 uses Cro-magnon in section 3, “The Cro-magnoid Blue Man.”

   Richard Klein, a Stanford professor of anthropological sciences, has what many consider a controversial explanation for the sudden development of cave art. "I think there was a biological change -- a genetic mutation of some kind that promoted the fully modern ability to create and innovate." In an interview last year, he stood by his theory despite disagreements. “We know that over the course of evolution, there’s been a huge amount of genetic change. We start with people with brains one-third the size of ours, and then we have us”, bringing in a sudden revolution in human culture.

   This idea of a biological mutation would be supported by the The UB account that individuals from the blue race and the Adamic race were mating. “The Adamic descendants preferred them to all of the later persisting colored races.” (64:6.21)

   “The blue men, then dominant in Europe, had no religious practices which were repulsive to the earlier migrating Adamites, and there was great sex attraction between the violet and the blue races. The best of the blue men deemed it a high honor to be permitted to mate with the Adamites. Every blue man entertained the ambition of becoming so skillful and artistic as to win the affection of some Adamite woman (80:1.6, pg. 890).”

   It appears their accomplishment in the arts was a result of this intermixing with the Adamites.

   However, it was not the first time in The UB’s history that the blue race excelled in art. The leader of the Planetary Prince’s “planetary council on art and science” was Mek. “Mek did a great deal to advance the culture of the Andonites and to improve the art of the blue man. A blend of the blue man with the Andon stock produced an artistically gifted type, and many of them became master sculptors.  They did not work in stone or marble, but their works of clay, hardened by baking, adorned the gardens of Dalamatia.” (66:5.26) Artistic gift was a potential the blue race always possessed as a genetic endowment, a gene first expressed or enhanced through the Andonite combination, then later through conjugal unions with the Adamites.

   Chauvet Cave was also in the news when a research article was published in the May 2012, “Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.” Several scientists from the University of Savoy, Aix-Marseille University and the Centre National de Prehistoire confirmed the paintings that were created by people in the Aurignacian era (named after Aurignac site in France), between 30,000 and 32,000 years ago. The findings are based on analysis using geomorphological and chlorine-36 dating of the rockslide surfaces around what is believed to be the cave’s only entrance. Analysis showed that the entrance was sealed by a collapsing cliff some 29,000 years ago, information that agrees with what was deduced from radiocarbon dating. Support for these dates also came from analysis of cave bear DNA found in Chauvet cave.

   In The Urantia Book history, this time period follows just after Adam and Eve’s occupation of Eden and of the Second Garden.

   Because of this long ago landslide, the Chauvet cave art was perfectly preserved. The general public has never been allowed to enter however director Werner Herzog received special permission from the French Minister of Culture to film inside the cave. The film consists of the cave footage as well as interviews with various scientists and historians. Herzog used 3-D in Cave of Forgotten Dreams to help "capture the intentions of the painters", who incorporated the stone wall's subtle bulges and contours into their art.

   The Chauvet cave has been sealed off since its discovery in 1994 partly because of the previous problems at Lascaux Cave (discovered earlier in 1940). The admission of 1,200 visitors a day breathing out carbon dioxide led to the growth of mold on the walls that damaged the art. This led to the closure of Lascaux in 1963 and the creation of a facsimile, the so-called "Faux Lascaux." A replica of Chauvet Cave is also being planned and is scheduled to open to the general public by the end of 2014.