Four teenagers and a hole in the hill
On 12 September 1940, four boys from Montignac, in the Dordogne in south-western France, squeezed into a hole on the hill above the town. Marcel Ravidat, a 17-year-old apprentice mechanic, was the eldest; the others were between 15 and 16. The story that their dog fell in first is told often but is uncertain. What they found was a cave covered in painted animals.
Their schoolmaster, Léon Laval, understood what it was, and the prehistorian Henri Breuil soon came to study it. The cave opened to the public on 14 July 1948, and success nearly ruined it: by 1955 about 1,200 visitors a day were bringing heat, moisture and carbon dioxide into a space that had been sealed for millennia. It closed in 1963, and it has been closed ever since.
How old? An estimate, not a birth date
The paintings are usually dated to about 17,000 to 22,000 years ago, a phase archaeologists call the early Magdalenian, after the French site of La Madeleine. That range comes from estimates from dating material found in the cave, so it tells you when people were working there, not the day any single animal was painted.
The width of the range is a clue in itself. Lascaux was not painted in one season by one artist: it is the combined work of many people, probably over generations. To put it in perspective, the black drawings of Chauvet, in the Ardèche, are dated nearly twice as old.
Who were the painters?
They were Homo sapiens, people with the same bodies and brains as ours, living by hunting and gathering in a much colder Europe. They left no writing, so everything we know about them comes from what they made and dropped. And what they made is a lot: nearly 6,000 figures, of which more than 900 can be identified as animals and 605 identified precisely.
Horses are by far the most frequent, followed by stags and aurochs, with ibex, bison and other animals in smaller numbers. Next to them come dots, grids and lines, the kind of signs whose meaning is lost. The colours are red, yellow and black, from iron oxides such as ochre and from minerals containing manganese; charcoal was used only sparingly.
The Hall of the Bulls
The first large chamber is the one everyone pictures. Four huge black aurochs, the wild cattle of Ice Age Europe, dominate a procession of 36 animals, including horses and stags. One of the bulls is about 5.2 metres long, the largest animal yet found in cave art. The hall has a guide of its own.
The Axial Gallery: animals on the ceiling
From the Hall of the Bulls a narrow corridor leads straight on. In this Axial Gallery, aurochs and horses are joined by deer and ibex, and some of the animals are painted across the ceiling so that they roll across the ceiling from one wall to the other. Some figures sit where the wall meets the ceiling, between 2.5 and 3.5 metres above the floor.
So how did anyone paint up there? The archaeologist André Glory reported, on the sides of the gallery, sockets for interlocked beams, crusted over with calcite, which he linked to the painting of a great black bull. The French Ministry of Culture accepts that scaffolding was used for certain figures. It warns against extending the idea to the whole cave: the shape of the rock often decided how a figure was made, and platforms or poles were probably needed only in rare cases.
The Apse: more than a thousand engravings
Further in, a rounded chamber known as the Apse holds a different kind of art. Here most of the figures are engraved rather than painted, scratched into the rock with stone tools, and there are more than a thousand of them, often overlapping so densely that they are hard to separate. Some of them, like those in the Axial Gallery, sit high where the wall turns into the ceiling.
The only human, at the bottom of the Shaft
From the Apse the cave drops into a shaft about 9 metres deep. At the bottom is the most puzzling scene of Lascaux: a man with a bird’s head, a bison that seems to be wounded, and a rhinoceros. It is the only human figure in the whole cave, and it is drawn in a much sketchier style than the animals around it.
Why paint here, in the dark, far from where people lived? Ideas range from hunting magic to rituals, myths told in pictures and meeting places for groups. Each fits some details of Lascaux and fails others. What you can say for sure is that the painters chose their walls carefully, built platforms to reach them and came back for generations. Like the rest of prehistoric art, Lascaux shows the effort clearly and keeps the reason to itself.
Where to see it
The original cave has been closed to visitors since 1963. You can see it through replicas at Montignac: Lascaux II, opened in 1983, reproduces the Hall of the Bulls and the Axial Gallery, and Lascaux IV, the International Centre for Cave Art opened in 2016, reproduces almost the whole cave.
Sources
- Ministère de la Culture, Lascaux website: “The four discoverers”, themes and “Access to the walls”.
- Aujoulat, N., Lascaux: Movement, Space and Time (New York, 2005).
- Office de Tourisme Lascaux-Dordogne, “La grotte de Lascaux” and “Lascaux II”.
