Docufilms.com ^®

A team of archaeologists from St. Petersburg and Ufa is en route in the Ural mountains in the Russian Republic of Bashkortotstan. Its destination: the Kapova Cave, the most important painted cave in Eastern Europe. The ancestors of the present-day Bashkirs came here about a thousand years ago as nomads from the Altai Mountains and Central Asia. But the mammoths, horses, woolly rhinos and mysterious symbols, painted with ochre, tell of an era over 16,000 years ago. World-famous painted caves from the same era are also to be found in France and Spain. In the Kapova Cave, as in the Ignatievka Cave, 300 kilometres away and the second most important painted cave in the Urals, the archaeologists find hardly any remains of objects in everyday use. This means that the caves were not lived in. They were presumably the secret sites of shaman rituals. The dwellings of the Ice-Age hunters have long since disappeared. In Kostenki on the River Don traces of these places can still be found. Kostenki means “village of bones” and is one of the rare sites worldwide, where traces of these settlements are still to be found. The hunters of the late Stone Age built their winter-proof huts with huge bones, and from the tusks of the mammoths they made tools, jewellery and mysterious statuettes of women. These Venus figures as a symbol of fertility closely resemble those found in Western Europe. The Venus statuettes are the expression of a highly developed civilisation at the end of the late Stone Age, extending from the Atlantic up to the Urals.