LONDON: About a kilometre into the mountain in the Ariege region of the Pyrenees, I trained my miner’s lamp on to the wall in front of me to see the bison that had been painted 12,000 years before. Opportunities to get so close to the images made by ancient man are scarce, and extremely moving.

In some places in the Niaux cave the footprints of the artist are still visible in the hardened sand, and way off in a side chamber, you can find the spot where a man once crouched beside an underground stream with a tallow lamp and carved a salmon into the rock.

Modern art historians and paleo-anthropologists spend enormous energy trying to interpret these ancient cycles of art, hazarding at the beliefs which inspired them. But if you look at the works without worrying about these problems, you see them for what they are — some of the greatest works of art ever made.

The love of form and movement, the flare in execution, the lightning powers of observation are all recognisably part of us.

We will never know precisely what drove them to explore the depths of the mountain where cave bears sheltered from the cold of the Ice Age, but their paintings say much about their lively intelligence. It would be extraordinary if the tradition of cave painting, which stretches back 32,000 years, was not matched by similar sophistication in the other two strands of culture — music and story telling. It is the latter that interests me because I recently served on a film jury and became obsessed by the feebleness of most of the plots I had to watch.

Story telling and listening to stories is as much a part of human nature as the instinct to make a mark with a stick of charcoal, or to blow into a hollowed bone and discover what can be done with musical notes. Stories have been around as long as man has had language and been capable of manipulating symbols in his head.

They trigger the very deepest parts of our psychology. When we are asleep the mind does not rest, but busily makes up stories — often rather interesting ones — and in our conscious life, there is nothing which engages us more quickly than the beginning of a good story.—Dawn/The Observer News Service