What am I doing in Southern France?

Have you ever had a dream come true? In this special episode, I pull back the curtain on my sabbatical, my next book, and the secret fascination that has guided my life for the past six years — the mysterious world of the Upper Paleolithic. Join me as I travel into the painted caves of southern France to meet our Deep Ancestors, and explore what their art, consciousness, and reverence for the unseen can teach us about what it means to be human — and how to imagine a new future for humanity.

IN THE EPISODE:
(0:00) – What I’ve been doing in southern France (and how it connects to my next book)
(3:45) – Understanding the Upper Paleolithic time period in Europe
(12:10) – Inside the Paleolithic caves: bison, horses, handprints, and torchlight
(23:39) – Who the Deep Ancestors were — and why their wisdom still matters
(30:41) – How connecting with them will help us imagine a new future on Earth

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When we can understand the ways in which our ancestors thought about themselves, about the world, the way they experienced the world, the awareness in general that they had access to, we reconnect with our potential as humans, and we reconnect with what’s possible for us in the future. So why don’t you come inside the caves with me. Hello and welcome back to Remember Why You Are Here, a podcast for seekers and sensitives where you can relax, receive, reconnect yourself, and remember the most important thing of all – why you’re here. I’m Asia Suler, author, earth intuitive, and very recently researcher who has skipped across the pond overseas to research my next book. So if you’ve been following along on the podcast or if you’re over on my email list where I’ve been sharing even more that I’ve been on sabbatical for the last several months working on my next book.
So in this very personal episode, I’m going to pull back the curtain to reveal what I’ve been doing on my sabbatical, what this next book is actually about, and I want to talk to you about this thing that has been my special interest for the last six years, a time period that I truly believe is here to guide us all, and that is the Upper Paleolithic. So have you ever had a dream come true, something you’ve been wishing for, praying towards, putting on your altar, leaning into dreaming about? Well, for me, this trip was a dream come true. I have been wanting to take this trip to Southern France, to the Dordogne Valley, to visit these sites from the Upper Paleolithic for six years. First the pandemic came in, and then I got pregnant and I had my daughter, and I knew it was going to take time before I was ready to take this trip, ready to be away from her.
This was the first time I had been away from my daughter for longer than just a few days. So it was a really big deal for me. I just feel so blessed and honored that this happened. Travel, especially solo travel, especially pilgrimage, is really at the heart of who I am. It’s something that’s so important to me. So getting to take this trip was just absolutely unbelievably a dream come true, and it has really taken me into the next phase of writing this next book. So in this part of southern France, there is an unbelievable wealth of archeological sites from this time period that we call the Upper Paleolithic. I was going there to visit these caves, these painted caves, these caves that were anointed, consecrated by our ancestors. For this next book, which I’m excited to talk to you a little about, actually give you a little bit more about what I am writing about.
But first I want to ground us in what is the Upper Paleolithic. If you’re not familiar with that term, let’s really dive in there because it’s so rich and so fascinating. And I really think once we start connecting to those who I call the deep ancestors, it’s almost like there’s no going back because we start to see ourselves differently. The Paleolithic as a period of time is very vast. It goes from about 3 million years ago until about 10,000 years ago. So that’s a really big span of time, the specific period of time that I have been studying, and that as at the heart of this book is the Upper Paleolithic. So the Upper Paleolithic is a timeframe from about 50,000 years ago to about 12 to 10,000 years ago. And this period of time is when we know humans, homosapiens spread around the world.
Left Africa went to literally every corner of the globe. Homosapiens arrived in Europe about 45,000 years ago, and when they arrived, they were not alone. They, when they arrived, the continent was already inhabited by Neanderthals and these humans had lived in Europe for hundreds of thousands of years. So Europe at that time was very different than Europe is now, because we were in the midst of the last great ice age. So there were huge caps of ice that came really far down into the consonant of Europe, and it made it so that it was really the southern swath of Europe that was inhabitable, and that includes the valleys of Southern France, and they would’ve looked completely different than today. So this would’ve been cold step and tundra grasslands with huge herds of animals, mammoths, reindeer, bison, aurochs, horses. Many of these beings feature in the paintings in southern France in these caves, and I want to talk about them in a little bit, but it’s important to know that the reason why there’s such a dense accumulation of sites in places like Southern France is because this is where the consonant itself was inhabitable at that period of time. The humans who entered Europe at that time, who around the world were entirely modern humans. They were just like us. We are the same in body, in nervous system, in brain, in soma, in imagination and creativity. And this is something that I feel really passionate about talking about because so many of us were handed such strong caricatures of what it means to be a caveman growing up. And it’s completely wrong. It’s completely opposite the reality of these incredibly sophisticated, intelligent, creative, innovated, frankly cosmopolitan people who spread throughout the world had the ability to go to every single continent and bring with them just incredibly intricate traditions of artistry, philosophy, adornment, ancestral wisdom, traditions that likely stretched back millennia. So connecting with these deep ancestors is actually incredibly potent and powerful for us. Now, they have a lot to teach us now, and part of my passion for the last six years has been learning about this time period and realizing that so much that I had been handed about the deep past was completely wrong.
So we know that these deep ancestors were living in hunting and gathering bands of about 20 to 40 people, but that they would also have times of the year where they would meet up in really large groups, accumulations of people for gatherings, for I imagine coming together to flirt with one another and to make connections and to trade and to trade ideas. We know that they had trade routes that spread hundreds of miles to the coastlines, which at that time was much further out than they are now because so much water in the world was locked up in those glaciers that in order to receive, for example, seashells, which were a really popular trade item at the time from the coast, we would’ve gone so much further in order to be able to trade those items. So they had textiles, they had bead industry workshops, they had really sophisticated painting tools, pigments, brushes, sponges for dobbing on the paint.
So I’m sharing all of this to just start to rewrite this really fossilized and frankly controlled narrative of what our deep ancestors were like. A lot of what we’re handed this information when we look at our deep ancestors is very much flavored by the colonial narrative that existed in European anthropology around the turn of the last century. And so it’s really important that we start to unpack all of this and actually see just how profoundly intelligent, capable, creative, sophisticated these deep ancestors are. We know they likely had larger brains than us. They were taller than us, healthier than us. They had yet to develop all the zoological diseases that we have now, and just like a tiny little example into the level of sophistication that they had, but also the level of leisure time that they likely had. So this is something that we guesstimate that likely they were only spending about four hours of their day in subsistence activities and activities like gathering food and preparing food and all of that. And so they had so much more what we would call leisure time, but creativity, time, innovation time. Here’s just a little example. There is a really famous grave site in Russia, the Sungir grave site, and there’s a man and two children buried there. There was so many beads in this grave site. Thousands of beads each bead, each one of these beads that would’ve likely been sewn onto their clothing took about 45 minutes to make. If we think about that, the beads that were buried with the two children, it would’ve taken around 3,500 hours to make that many beads. So this is just like a portal into understanding this life way of our deep ancestors, of our ancient ancestors. So I went to Southern France in particular to visit the painted caves. If you’ve ever seen Werner Herzog’s film, cave of Forgotten Dreams, you’re probably familiar with these caves, but there is an incredible collection of caves, some of which are still open to the public that feature paintings from this time period. So we’re talking paintings from about 40,000 years ago to about 12,000 years ago. So that’s a really vast period of time, and I want to bring your attention, your awareness to that, that we’re talking about a 30,000 year span of creating art inside of these caves. And we’re going to come back to that in just a moment. But I want to talk for a second about why these caves for me. Well, I had a vision six years ago in a meditation where I actually came out of one of these caves and was a little bit like, where am I? What’s going on? This wasn’t even where I intended to go, and it sparked this huge passion in me for learning about these caves, learning about the art inside of these caves who created them reading every book about the possible hypotheses of what these different paintings represented or what they could mean. So the oldest known painted cave that has been discovered is Chauvet Cave in France, and this is about 35 to 30,000 years old. So what’s really interesting about Chauvet is that up until its discovery in the nineties, the caves we had discovered previously, like Lascaux for example, were much closer to the current day.
And so we had this assumption, which we tend to replicate a lot, this assumption that we evolved over time and that we got more artistry, more skill, and that it was sort of this upward projection. But when we found Chauvet, this incredibly old cave, and we saw the intricate artistic skill inside this cave, it completely rewrote this whole narrative about this trajectory of humanity just keeps evolving. And we started out very basic, and now we’re getting more and more evolved. And actually what we’re seeing is that this intricate artwork that was created later on was just a continuation of this tradition. And so in this way, everything’s always moving in a cycle, right? And it’s good to question, to ask ourselves, is it that we’re continuing to evolve now? Or is it actually that we’re being asked to evolve and get in touch again with the kind of intelligence, artistry and creativity that we inhabited in the past?
Are we more evolved than our deep ancestors, or have we actually taken a step back and there’s a clarion call I feel inside of me now to reconnect with these deep ancestors so that we can continue to evolve, but we can evolve in the way perhaps humans were meant to evolve. We can remember that pathway. So what’s really interesting about these caves, and one of the reasons why they’ve been so profoundly studied beyond the fact that they’re exquisite and absolutely stunning is because the artwork, the material from the past has lasted so well. And this is something about the archeological record. Things disappear. Things are lost, things get broken. What we know and what we can see is just a tiny little sliver glimpse into the past that is completely based on what survives thousands of years. So one of the things I do want to point out here though is that there was a continuation in the artistic style, but also within the subject matter during this entire timeframe, this 30,000 year timeframe.
So just to put this in perspective, Chauvet is as old compared to Lascaux as Lascaux is to us today. So that right there is a 15,000 year time period. We’re talking about more than a thousand generations. We’re creating art with similar subject matter, similar animals, similar style. There were stylistic conventions of the time. So we have to imagine that whatever this culture, this belief system, this mythology was, and we’ll never know for sure what this mythology was, we can surmise at least that as Gregory Curtis puts it in The Cave Painters, that it was so fulfilling and profound that it lasted for more than 20,000 years. We’d be hard pressed to find anything within our culture, within our belief systems that have lasted longer than maybe even just a handful of thousand years, let alone 20,000. So this is profoundly interesting to me, right in a time where we feel so unfulfilled, many of us where we feel adrift, what was it that our deep ancestors were attuned to, had the capability of seeing experiencing within themselves within the world that was that fulfilling, that profound, that anchoring, that meaningful, that an artistic tradition flourishing out of that belief system lasted that long.
So why don’t you come inside the caves with me? While I was in France, I got to visit seven different sites at each one was completely different, but each one was also similar. Each one had similar themes, similar energy, but also similar feeling to them. So all of these caves now have doors set into their walls. One of the reasons why this particular region and southern friends was so popular is that there are limestone caves that make for really easy living. People at that time did not live inside the caves. They lived in the rock shelters on the outside of the caves. They lived in the south facing rock shelters at the time. It was very cold. You would want the sunlight coming in. You’d want your fire at the mouth of the rock shelter to be able to protect yourself and provide heat because it was steppe tundra. You’d be able to be at the mouth of this cave, this rock shelter, and look out over the entire valley, which is a really cool, really thing to remember. This is the sight line that these people had from their homes. We are pretty sure now that most of these rock shelters were also elaborately decorated, but that has survived because of weather and time. But what is deep inside the caves has survived. So we know that these ancestors went very deep inside these caves that they explored the length of a football field down into the earth, and more that they went into these caves and into some of the most difficult passages of these caves with oil lamps that likely lasted around an hour and a half, maybe two hours. These oil lamps were in their simplest forms stone that had been carved out with animal fat and a wick, and they would carry the stone lamp sometimes crawling on their bellies for a long time, deep, deep into these caves. So oftentimes they chose to create images in the deepest, darkest places. They chose to move beyond the entryway deep into these caves.
And one of the most fascinating things I’ve found about being there in person, because I’ve been researching, looking at pictures for so many years now, but seeing it in person, you really understand that they weren’t creating these images like we create images now where we have a blank canvas. They were co-creating these images with the cave. So inside of these caves are incredibly, highly skilled depictions of bisons, horses, mammoths. There are aurochs, there are lions. Every once in a while, a caricature of a human. Humans were not very flushed out. They were not the center of this artistic tradition, which is an interesting point unto itself. There are dots, there’s symbols, there are spirals, there are hand prints. But what is interesting to me is that the stars of the show are the animals by and large. And what they did is they looked for the ways in which these animals were emerging from the cave walls.
So rather than clearing off a space that they could create themselves as whoever the individual was, instead they looked for places in the cave walls and the drips of minerals and the sheen of calcite that already looked like an animal. And then at times, they drew the minimum, the minimum possible line to just bring that shape out of the wall. And what’s incredible is that you often get one go at creating that line. And so these people must have practiced for thousands of hours to be able to, with one stroke, so perfectly capture the exact form of a horse or the exact outline of a buffalo. It’s perfection is astounding in many places. And they were masters at perspective. So they would draw things specifically so that it could be seen in a particular way from a particular angle. So at times they were aware of what angle it was being looked at.
They would create certain effects so that it would look in proportion depending on where you were standing. They created distance and depth with their artwork. They created techniques like the trompe-l’œil effect that we wouldn’t see again until much later, until the explosion of the Renaissance. In Europe, images were sometimes made to look like they were coming out of a crack or they were rounding the corner in a cave or that it looked different from one side versus another that the face of an animal would transform. So from one angle it would be a buffalo. And from another, it almost looks like a human profile. Artists would deliberately abstract elements in the cave. So we know, and I mentioned this earlier, that humans were deliberately abstracted, very much so on purpose, abstracted. There is no full depiction of a human full realistic depiction of a human from head to toe anywhere within these caves within this vast period of time.
But they’d also deliberately abstract things to have it look further in the distance, like your eye wouldn’t see as many details. So you deliberately abstract part of an animal, set it behind another one so that you can tell you’re looking at a tableau. So there’s this whole element here inside the caves of interacting with the unseen and asking yourself what is more important, what is seen versus what is hidden? Because once you go inside these caves and you start to see the proliferation of these images, what they chose to bring out of the stone to show you what they were seeing, you realize, you start to see animals everywhere. You start to see shapes and faces absolutely everywhere you look. And so in this way, there was this interaction, this playful interaction with the unseen. And this is something that I feel really passionate about talking about because most of us, if we learned anything about these caves growing up, it was that they were likely some sort of hunting magic that was being performed.
And in most of this literature, talking about these caves as hunting magic, as sympathetic magic, it’s specifically proposed that it was men inside of these caves making the images so that they’d be successful in the hunts. But we know now that that is not true. So in certain time periods, some of the most depicted animals, mammoths, horses, bison, were not the animals that people were by and large eating during some of these time periods. 90% of the bones that were found in archeological digs are reindeer. People very easily were subsiding off of reindeer. It was a super easeful life, pretty sure about that. And yet, reindeer are actually not very commonly depicted inside of these paintings. They’re pretty rare. And so this whole idea that it was this one specific purpose for the caves is completely incorrect. We also know through new research that is actually able to measure hand and hand widths that the people inside these caves were not predominantly men, but actually most of the hands that we have measured are predominantly women, and that we know that there were whole families going inside these caves that children created art, that baby’s hands were placed on the walls with careful outlines made of them.
So these places were actually much more communal, much more relational, much more egalitarian than we had imagined before or than certain people had imagined before. And also the depictions of these animals inside the caves. What I want to express about it now after having been there in person, is that the thing that touched me the most is the depth of these animals’. Benevolence inside of these animals’ faces, they’re drawn with such sensitivity, such intelligence, such sentience. Each one is their own character. Each single animal is their complete own character. And instead of depicting these animals as being struck down in a hunt, the thing that we see over and over and over again, the most recurrent theme you could say of these caves, our gentle meetings, gentle meetings, two animals or more, coming together, seeing one another overlapping one another. This is another interesting thing about the caves, is they didn’t have the same conventions around subject hood that we do. They weren’t trying to just have one image of one creature. In fact, it was clearly much more valued to see how they would overlap.
So there will be a horse on top of a bison, on top of an auroch, and they’d share certain lines and other lines would branch out. And so it was actually way more about the overlap, way more about the meeting, the singular, the individual, so much less important than the meeting of these animals, the gentleness of a horse that is pregnant, a grave mare looking out among her sisters, the tenderness of a male reindeer licking the top of a female reindeer’s head. So this completely rewrite so much of what we’re handed, this really like sketchy, incomplete, and inaccurate viewpoint that were handed about our ancestors, what they created, what their mythology was based on was so clearly something steeped in reverence for the sentience of the living world of animals, of the individuality, of characters, of these animals, of the sacredness, of gentle meetings. There’s humor inside of these caves. There’s playfulness, and I’m here to report that being inside the caves, we so often think that caves are these scary places. They’re dark and they’re dangerous and all of that. But my experience of being inside these caves, especially times when we turned off all the lights and we just sat there, it was wombic. I felt so held, I felt, I felt so sheltered, I felt so seen. And so to me, walking through these caves, it actually was this experience of going deeper into what felt like the hips of the earth, what really did feel like this sheltering, welcoming, warm, womb space. And so I guess my invitation in talking about this is to invite you deeper into your deep ancestors, into your past. And then to know that by connecting with these deep ones, you’re going into this place that is not scary or fraught or so intensely different from you, that it’s difficult to connect, that it’s actually going into this more wombic like space, this space that is sheltering, that is warm, that is inviting, that is filled with benevolence and gentleness, and really this invitation for gentle meetings. I’m feeling this very strongly as I’m working on this book that there is a strong invitation back into a gentle meeting with our own deep ancestors.
And so this is what I’ve been working on. This is what my book is about. My book is about the deep ancestors, how they thought, thought about themselves, how they thought about the world. It’s about what I’m calling paleolithic consciousness. How did these deep ancestors think? We know that the paleolithic as a time period comprises 99% of human history. This is who we were for 99% of our history and embody in Soma in brain and nervous system. We are exactly the same as these deep ancestors. And so this call for me began about six years ago, as I mentioned, to start understanding this time period so I could start understanding the consciousness in whatever way I have access to start understanding the consciousness of my own deep ancestors. And this is about understanding the past for sure. It’s about reconnecting with these ancestors, these ancestors who I believe really want to work with us.
But it’s also about the future. Because when we can understand the ways in which our ancestors thought about themselves, about the world, the way they experience the world, the self-awareness, the awareness in general that they had access to, we reconnect with our potential as humans and we reconnect with what’s possible for us in the future. I’ve heard a lot of archeologists say it’s not a matter of if we will one day return to the stone age, but a matter of when. That might be very far in the future. It might not, who knows? But what I know is that for me, connecting with these deep ancestors has opened up so many gateways, so many doorways for me has opened up so many ways of thinking that I deeply need in my own life to flourish. And what I see, the wisdom, the perspective, the consciousness of our ancestors, what is being given to us, the messages that are coming through for us now is it’s like being given a lamp to move through whatever’s to come, to move through whatever feels dark or hidden before us. So this is what I’ve been working on. I imagine it might take me another few years to be totally honest, to finish this book. There’s a lot I want to say. There’s a lot I need to research. So it’s feeling very tender to talk about this book now and what it is that I’m creating, but it also feels so life-giving to share this with you. I’m so grateful for all the ways in which I’ve been supported on the sabbatical. I literally could not have done this without all of your support. Every time you leave a rating, every time you leave a review, every time you buy something off the website, all of those things are just so profoundly helpful for me in being able to do this. And I have so much gratitude. Thank you, thank you, thank you for supporting me in this. And I’m curious, as we are still in what I consider so season, this season from the Celtic perspective of connecting with the ancestors, I’m curious how this is landing with you, if it’s stretching your understanding of the time period in which you can connect with your ancestors in which you can communicate with them. So if you want to share with me, feel free to leave a comment here, or you can head on over to my website, asiasuler.com/remember and leave me a voicemail. I love getting voice notes over there, and since I am so close now to the end of my sabbatical, I’m excited to be diving back in there. I’m also going to be starting to create new content for next year here on the podcast. If there’s something you want to suggest, something you’re excited about, please let me know about that. We are about to enter the holiday season. If you are feeling benefic and would like to leave a review or some stars for this podcast, it helps so much and it means so much to me. So thank you for listening. Thank you for being the person that you are. This light coming from the deep past, you are one of the descendants that your ancestors prayed for, and I’m so grateful that you’re here. I’m so grateful that we are doing this excavation together and this exploration and this pilgrimage deeper into life. And may what I shared today. And may, what’s opening for you within your connections with your own deep ancestors, just lead you deeper into the meaning of your own life, into the kind of fulfillment that is awaiting you in this lifetime and into that deep remembering of the most important thing of all why you’re here.