Daily Inspiration Quote by Jan de Bont

There is a disarming, tourist-postcard sincerity to Jan de Bont calling humanity's birthplace "quite amazing" - and that plainness is the point. De Bont is a director, a professional manufacturer of awe. Yet here he frames wonder not through spectacle, but through proximity: being in the place matters as much as what you see there. It's a filmmaker's instinct turned outward, treating geography like a set with built-in narrative weight.

The phrase "scientists believe" quietly does two jobs. It borrows authority without pretending to be an anthropologist, and it keeps the claim elastic. He's not staking a flag in a contested theory of origins; he's legitimizing a feeling. That hedge also signals a modern relationship to science: we accept it as our best story generator, even as we know its stories get revised. The awe isn't threatened by uncertainty; it's enhanced by it.

Contextually, the line fits the late-20th/early-21st-century creative pilgrimage: artists traveling to "real" locations to recharge a sense of scale after living inside constructed worlds. The subtext is about humility, and maybe relief. In an industry built on controlling every frame, the idea that there exists a landscape so old it precedes plot is a reminder that some backdrops can't be fabricated. "Mankind started" is a blunt, almost mythic shorthand, but it works because it collapses time into a single, cinematic establishing shot: you, standing where the story begins.