The Lascaux cave

The story

The dog, the hole and four boys

In September 1940 France was occupied by the German army and there was war in Europe. In the village of Montignac, in the Dordogne, an eighteen-year-old boy, Marcel Ravidat, was walking in the woods with his dog, named Robot. According to the story, the dog suddenly vanished into a hole between the roots of a fallen tree. Marcel called him, widened the opening, threw in some stones and heard them fall a very long way down. On 12 September he came back with an oil lamp and three friends, Jacques Marsal, Georges Agnel and Simon Coencas, one of whom was a Jewish boy who had taken refuge in the village from the city. They lowered themselves one at a time down a narrow shaft and arrived in a large chamber.

By the flickering light of the lamps they saw enormous animals appear on the walls: bulls, horses, deer, which seemed to move. It was not possible at that moment to understand how ancient the drawings were, but the four boys realised they had found something extraordinary. They told their schoolteacher, who alerted an expert: Abbé Henri Breuil, the best-known scholar of prehistoric art of the time, who visited the cave a few days later and recognised it as a masterpiece.

The Hall of the Bulls

Lascaux is not a single chamber, but a small system of galleries. The first, the most spectacular, is called the Hall of the Bulls. Here four great aurochs, that is, wild cattle now extinct, decorate the walls: one of them is more than five metres long, perhaps the largest painted figure in all known prehistoric art. Around them are horses, stags with branching antlers and small mysterious signs, dots and rectangles. In other galleries there are ibexes, bison, a big cat and a strange figure called “the unicorn”, which has nothing to do with the myth: it is an animal with two long straight horns and a swollen body, whose meaning nobody has explained.

In all, archaeologists count about 600 painted animals and many more engraved ones. In the “Shaft”, a small deep recess, there is the only scene with a human figure: a man with a bird's head, lying on the ground, in front of a wounded bison. What it tells, nobody knows.

How it was painted

The prehistoric artists used red and yellow ochre, and black minerals such as manganese dioxide, and charcoal. The colours were ground to powder and spread with the fingers, with pads, or sprayed: the powder was blown from the mouth or through a bone tube. To reach the high parts of the walls they built wooden scaffolding, of which the holes in the rock remain. To see in the dark they lit sandstone lamps in which animal fat burned: many have been found. Scholars have also dated the charcoal left in the cave, and the result is that the paintings are between about 21,000 and 18,000 years old; several scholars think they were made at different times by different groups, and some points remain to be clarified.

Opened, closed, copied

After the war, in 1948, the cave was opened to visitors. The success was enormous: in the 1950s more than a thousand a day came. But the air the visitors breathed out, with its warmth, humidity and carbon dioxide, changed the environment of the cave. Green patches of algae and white crusts of calcite began to appear on the walls. In 1963, to save the paintings, the French government, led in this by the Minister of Culture André Malraux, closed the cave to the public.

To let everyone still admire Lascaux, copies were built. Lascaux II, opened in 1983, reproduces the Hall of the Bulls and another gallery a few hundred metres from the original. Lascaux IV, opened in 2016, is a complete replica, made with laser scans and painted by hand by artists, housed in a modern museum called the International Centre for Cave Art. Lascaux III is a travelling exhibition.

The real cave, however, is still not safe today: in the 2000s new fungi and black stains called for continuous treatment. Very few people enter each year, only scientists and restorers, for short inspection visits. An important lesson: protecting a treasure also means knowing how to give up visiting it.