cave

After checking out  the cave paintings, and discussing them in class, i feel that the paintings were not symbols of a religion. The portrayal of the animals shows that these ancient communities revered these beasts, but that doesn't lead me to believe that the drawings were religious symbols. It just says to me that these guys were in touch with nature. 

They lived as a part of nature back then more then we do now. Those people were in the wild. When they drew on the cave walls, i feel like they were just drawing an important aspect of their life. wild game was vital to their survival, and they were painting what was important to them. They obviously had some sort of respect for these wild animals, but the paintings don't make me believe that they were religious, they were just paintings of an important aspect of their life.

I also saw some similarity between the paintings and the Grizzly Man movie. It seems like they were both trying to show nature as nature, and to find a way to express their respect for nature. i forget the guys name, Treadmill or Tread-something, but i thoguht that by filming these bears and educating children on them, he was trying to show what he felt the bears were really like in nature. He was trying to show that there was more then what we hear about how dangerous they are. He was expressing his understandings of nature, to many people, which is what the cave paintings might have been also trying to do. 

No one can really say for sure, because there is nothing telling us what the paintings were purpose was, but this is a possibility. who knows, maybe every animal painting, was actually of a different animal-god that those people had.