“UNKNOWN: CAVE OF BONES” My rating: B (Netflix)
93 minutes | No MPAA rating
One of my all-time favorite documentaries is Werner Herzog’s 2011 “Cave of Forgotten Dreams” in which the eccentric filmmaker took a 3-D camera into a French cave to record the incredible wall paintings of animals rendered more than 30,000 years ago.
The makers of that art were clearly human, and as I noted at the time, “Cave…” is about nothing less than the birth of the human soul.
The perfect bookend to Herzog’s masterwork is “Unknown: Cave of Bones,” Mark Mannucci’s chronicle of the the almost decade-long exploration of the Rising Star cave system in South Africa.
Rising Star contains a treasure trove of bones belonging to hominids that lived between 250,000 and 300,000 years ago. They were small creatures with brains about the size of a chimpanzee’s. They are regarded as animals, not humans.
This newly discovered ancient species was dubbed homo naledi.
Early on we meet paleoanthropologist Lee Berger, an American-born South African in charge of the project. He, along with a couple of colleagues, becomes our narrator and guide into a mystery that stretches back to the beginning of our world.
The deeper explorers penetrated the cave, the more surprises they encountered.
Lee Berger
In a room so inaccessible that only the thinnest of scientists could squeeze through to it (Berger tells us up front that he’ll never see the place save on a video feed…he’s too hefty to make his way there) the team discovered the bones of one individual who had undergone special treatment.
His/her remains had not been abandoned on the cave floor. They had been deliberately buried. Moreover, the body had to have been carried or dragged up and down a daunting series of chutes, inclines and crawl spaces to get there.
Wait a minute. Burial implies a social system. It implies that these creatures had the emotional capacity to protect or honor the remains of a beloved individual. And it strongly suggests that homo naledi was contemplating an afterlife.
But weren’t these just, well, animals?
It gets better. The scientists discover a burial in which a stone had been placed in the deceased’s hand…a stone that apparently had been knapped to create a sharp edge and a pointed end.
In other words, a tool.
And cross-hatch patterns are found scratched into the cave wall. We call that art.
Unfolding as a kind of real-life mystery, “Unknown…” alternates terrific footage from inside the cave with talking head commentary from Berger and fellow primatologists Agustin Fuentes and John Hawks.
These guys are scientists. They deal in facts. They’re uncomfortable with metaphysical postulating.
And yet their worlds are rocked by the notion that 200,000 years before homo sapiens emerged there were creatures exhibiting human-like behavior: funerary rituals, tool creating, art making. Raising the question of just how we’re supposed to define the words “human being.”
Mannucci’s documentary is immeasurably aided by the use of animated sequences to suggest how homo naledi might have looked and moved. These black-and-white sequences are painterly, blurred just enough to give an idea of this ancient world without depicting details that might not be supported by the evidence.
The result is a haunting, unexpectedly moving dreamlike experience that leaves the viewer in quiet awe.
| Robert W. Butler
Butler's Cinema Scene 