Early Man in Motion Picture

There is a period of time we are familiar with the acronym "BC". It stands, of course, for "Before Christ", the period before the famous tale about the origin of the Christian religion. But this time goes far behind Jesus. Far beyond the origin of all monotheistic religions. It goes even before the eons when our ancestors knew gods in the plural and to the ages when modern humans started their everlasting and ongoing endeavors. The time in prehistory was occupied with the endless wonders of surrounding nature without firm beliefs but surely filled with many invisible divine spirits and mysterious stars.

Due to the illiteracy of the period, there's almost nothing tangible we could use to gain full knowledge of what early society really looked like, and even though we know a great deal about those times only by analyzing cave walls, fossil records, and DNA samples, in order to describe one early settlement, we still must use lots of imagination and scientific guesses.

Personally and definitely caused by the mystery of the ancient times, I do enjoy reading and, in this case, watching fictitious stories about early people, events, and how everything was in the beginning. Hence, if we stay in the realm of motion pictures, I want to share four movie recommendations from the rather small pile of films covering prehistory free of wild imagination that might be anthropologically correct. So, let's start in, appropriately, in chronological and descending order, starting with the latest film about the earliest period of prehistory in all four movies. The story is about the first joint adventures of man and man's best friends. The wolves. Well, you know... the dogs.

Portraying Europe at the end of the Pleistocene epoch some 20,000 years ago, Alpha is telling an adventurous story of Keda, a teenage boy on his first hunting trip, and Alpha, the first domesticated wolf. They struggle to survive the harsh environment of the last ice age and, along the way, learn to enjoy new special friendships among two species. Something we are taking for granted in our very contemporary age. Three things about this movie are fascinating: for one, there are no human villains in the film, and this is amazing for nowadays movies, and yet the story works just as perfectly. Secondly, I learned something I didn't know: Alpha was played by a real Czechoslovakian Wolfdog, a mix between a German shepherd and real Carpathian wolves created for military purposes. I always admired German shepherds, but I have to say that this relatively new breed is really magnificent in every way. Finally, the language they used is a fictional one, fully developed for the movie by Christine Schreyer, an associate professor of anthropology at the University of British Columbia who used three ancestral languages in the process, and this effort alone gave the movie a genuine and really extraordinary feeling.

The next two movies went even further in the past. The set was still the Eurasian continent, and the time could be estimated at some 30-40K BC, when one of the kind events in the history of two dominant species happened. It was the time when our ancestors started to populate the area that was already taken by Neanderthals. Barely compatible, this caused the death of the weakest and most unprepared party in conflict. It is still a mystery what exactly was happening in those shared periods that probably lasted hundreds or more likely thousands of years, but in the aftermath, just like proposed in one of the movies, Neanderthals suffered and died out from both major issues: their bodies were totally unprepared for new diseases humans unknowingly delivered, and equally important, their minds couldn't stand or understand the violent behavior of newcomers.

Ao, le dernier Néandertal and The Clan of the Cave Bear are both dealing with the collision of two dominant humanoid species of the time only from different angles. At first, Ao was a desperate Neanderthal man whose family was brutally murdered by modern humans, and he was forced to seek his life elsewhere and find happiness with a homo sapiens woman. The movie offers outstanding performances by Aruna Shields and especially Simon Paul Sutton, who portrayed the story with one word—perfectly. The same goes for Jean Auel's first book of the "Earth's Children" series and the movie with the same name. Here, the script is the opposite and follows young girl Ayla, who finds shelter within the Neanderthal clan. It's hard to say which film is more appealing, historically accurate, better performed, and better made, but if you choose to watch them, entertainment filled with drama, adventure, and even romance is guaranteed.

Finally, if we go even further into the past, more or less 80000 years ago, in the time of tribal societies where the fire was a luxury and hard to find, the last film recommendation was the oldest movie of them all. Quest for Fire was filmed back in 1981, and it was the first movie I watched from this genre. I remember I was fascinated with scenes with mammoths who were played by circus elephants in full wardrobe and trained lions in the role of saber-toothed tigers. In short, three cavemen are sent on the quest to find the fire, for which they still don't have the knowledge of how to start it. The quest turned into a real adventure, and what they learned and returned to their cave was priceless. And I am not talking just about fire. Enough said.

Refs:
https://www.milanzivic.com/2015/10/neanderthals-humans-and-shared-caves.html
https://www.livescience.com/40311-pleistocene-epoch.html
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Czechoslovakian_Wolfdog
https://www.thestar.com/vancouver/2018/08/23/bc-professor-creates-language-for-alpha
https://www.cbc.ca/arts/the-wild-story-behind-quest-for-fire

Stone Age of Iron Gates

There were lots of breakthroughs in human history until this date. Some were instant and recognizable events or technological inventions, and some were slow evolutionary processes in the history of our species. Whatever they were, the outcome always reshaped the course of mankind entirely. In our own time, one of those is no doubt learning how to split the atom and invent the nuclear bomb. We are still living in the post-turbulence time of that latest breakthrough that has the potential to raise us from the Earth toward the stars. Some would say that it is still unknown whether this one is more of a civilization-killer event or a true entrance into another phase of humanity. We will wait and see. Either way, it is a breakthrough, nevertheless. In early human history there was one similar invention that had the same uncertainty. It was called the "Neolithic Revolution", and it happened in the middle of the Stone Age. And yes, even though we are still here, consequences of this invention are still very much all around us.

"Lepenski Vir" by Giovanni Caselli

Yes, the invention is, of course, agriculture along with domesticating wild animals. In this part of the world it happened around the year 5300 BC, and along with the Vinča culture, it was invented by one of the oldest civilizations that occupied Iron Gates, the great gorge of the mighty Danube, at the spot called Lepenski Vir (Lepen Whirlpool) near the Koršo hills at the right bank of the river. The gorge had everything for the rise of one medium-sized settlement for our Mesolithic predecessors. Large river with lots of fish; hills and valleys very near the bank with lots of small animals, deer, and especially easily hunted herds of aurochs (now extinct species of wild cows); and lots of water birds.

Many things happened in human minds with the agricultural way of life. If you ask me, it was the point when humans abandoned the 'natural' way of life, or, to better say it, it was the time when natural equilibrium with humans being just a part of the biodiversity microcosm of the inhabited area changed inevitably. We became the ultimate and the only player. Growing our own food and enslaving wild animals had raised us toward the godlike creatures, and we left our prehistorical ways for good. Just like with nuclear power, we made one great step in human evolution. And just like with the nuclear bomb, we invented all the side effects we are suffering to this day.

With agriculture we didn't just invent unlimited food supplies. We got ourselves envy and jealousy toward our own neighbor and cousin for simple things, like him having more food or land. We started to hunt for pleasure and not just for food. We started to steal and hate. We invented divine beings and prayers for them to spare our crops from natural hazards between planting and harvesting seasons. Let me just not repeat myself too much on the topic.

Anyway, yesterday I took my family to the Lepenski Vir and its wonderful museum to learn more of these great people and how and why, on Earth, they managed to survive several millenniums in tent-based settlements and lasted for maybe the longest period of time in human history. As for why, unfortunately I can't explain with words. You would have to visit Iron Gates and see it for yourself. In short, it is a beautiful site. The river is magnificent, and the gorge is one of a kind. The forests are still there, and the feeling is, well, if I were one of the Mesolithic explorers on foot, finding this place would be the same as finding heaven. Migrating it out would be, from one hunter and fisherman group's point of view, well, stupid.

Perhaps the only thing this place doesn't have is lots of room for large agriculture fields, and eventually these people left it as soon as they became too dependent on the Neolithic Revolution, and from that point in time in the fifth millennium before Christ, we have no idea where they went and spread. Probably upstream on the Danube in search of large plains for their crops is currently the most valuable scientific explanation. Maybe something more happened in addition to agricultural reasons to force them to leave, but we don't know. Today, one of the largest dams in the world, named 'Iron Gates I', created significant landscape change in the form of a long river lake and flooded the entire gorge and all the ancient settlements, preventing further exploration in search for more clues.

Perhaps, for me, these guys in pre-agricultural times were extremely interesting for many reasons. Anthropologically speaking, they were large compared to other humans in Europe at the time and lived longer and healthier lives. Thanks to their diet with most of the fish dishes on their stone tables, some of the prominent members of the society lived more than 60 years, and some of them were tall enough to play in the NBA with ease. Well, of course, most lived to about 40-50 years old, but with their average height of 165 for women and 172 for men, they might have origins in the old Cro-Magnon species from the Paleolithic. A fascinating story about all the skeletons in tombs was that no traces of violent deaths were found. Apparently, they were extremely peaceful people, and also, the interesting fact that all excavated skeletons (more than 150 in total) are missing only two teeth gives a clue that their amazing diet with almost 70% fish and the rest meat and berries was a fact that they literally lived in some sort of Mesolithic paradise.

At the end, all the main exploration and excavations of this site were made by Professor Dragoslav Srejović of the University of Belgrade. 136 buildings, settlements, and altars were found in the initial excavations in 1965-1970. I read somewhere that Dragoslav Srejović was a giant in a Newtonian way of definition, and I couldn't agree more. This short film above is the same one they played for us in the museum. I am sorry I couldn't find the one with English subtitles, but it was a great learning experience and an amazing documentary considering it was filmed in the same time lapse as the exploration. And as my wife noticed, it has even a romantic tale in the background that gives a special touch and feel of one typical archaeological life in the mid-sixties.

Refs:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lepenski_Vir
http://www.donsmaps.com/lepenski.html
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aurochs