Brains, indeed.
As some of you will know, I have done quite a lot of work on Palaeolithic cave art and have visited a lot of the relevant sites in France & northern Spain. A few years back, searching for one particular cave on the net, I came across an account by this American guy who claimed to have made an illicit trip into the cave and to have photographed an engraving of a sauropod dinosaur, face to face with a mammoth, before being chased off the site by the owner. He claimed that subsequently the site had been sealed & remained 'off limits' to visitors.
Now, this is a cave I know quite well, having visited it several times & being on good terms with the then owner (who sadly died a year or two ago). It was and is open to the public, albeit on a more limited basis than some as he fitted tour guiding around his farming work. it is now owned and run by his younger brother. I therefore contacted the American chap in order to have, or so I hoped, a friendly exchange about what he had, or had not, seen and to put right the more glaring factual errors in his account. Well, within three email exchanges he was warning me that my immortal soul was in grave danger if I persisted with these lies. At that point I concluded that the exchange was pointless and annoying and broke it off.
Yup, ignorance on this sort of level really does exist and really is what we are fighting.
And that (true) story does concern caves and caving 8)
:ang: