On 12 September 1940, in the woods above Montignac in the Dordogne, four teenage boys wriggled down a shaft that had opened beneath an uprooted tree, dropped into darkness with a home-made oil lamp, and looked up to find bulls the size of vans thundering across the ceiling. The eldest, 18-year-old Marcel Ravidat, had been led to the hole days earlier by his dog, Robot, who had taken an interest in it while chasing rabbits; Ravidat returned with three friends — Jacques Marsal, Georges Agniel and Simon Coencas — to see whether it might be the rumoured secret tunnel to the old manor. What they had actually found was Lascaux: the most spectacular gallery of Ice Age art ever discovered, painted by Magdalenian hunter-gatherers roughly 17,000 years ago, while France above them was newly fallen to Germany.
The cave is not large — a few hundred metres of chambers and passages — but it is dense with images: around 600 painted animals and well over a thousand engravings. Horses dominate, alongside stags, ibex, bison and the great aurochs of the Hall of the Bulls, one of which, at some 5.2 metres, is the largest single animal figure known in cave art. There are famous oddities: the so-called "unicorn", an unidentifiable beast with two straight horns; a frieze of stags' heads that seem to be swimming a river; and, down a shaft, the cave's lone human — a stick figure with a bird's head, sprawled before a wounded bison, one of prehistoric art's most argued-over scenes. Just as telling is what is missing: reindeer, the animal these people mostly ate, are almost entirely absent — a single depiction, in the chamber known as the Apse, is the only one identified in the whole cave. The painters worked deep in the dark by the light of stone lamps, blowing and dabbing mineral pigments — ochres and manganese black — through reeds and pads, and left no record of why.
From schoolboys to sentries
The boys initially kept the find to themselves, then told their schoolmaster, Léon Laval, and word soon reached the Abbé Henri Breuil, the great authority on prehistoric art, who was in the region sitting out the war. Breuil authenticated the paintings, and the description that stuck — the "Sistine Chapel of prehistory" — entered the language. Ravidat and Marsal camped by the entrance that first autumn to guard it from souvenir hunters. The war soon scattered the four: Simon Coencas, who was Jewish, was later interned at Drancy and survived; Marsal came back to Montignac and devoted the rest of his life to the cave, serving as its guide and guardian until his death.
Loved almost to death
Lascaux opened to the public in 1948, and that is when the trouble began. Up to a thousand and more visitors a day exhaled carbon dioxide, water vapour and warmth into a chamber that had held its own climate for seventeen millennia. By the 1950s came the "green sickness" — colonies of algae creeping across the walls — followed by the "white sickness", a veil of calcite crystallising over the paintings. In 1963 the culture minister André Malraux ordered the cave closed to the public, and closed it has remained, apart from strictly rationed conservation visits; a black fungal outbreak in the 2000s showed how fragile the equilibrium still is. The public got replicas instead, and remarkable ones: Lascaux II, an exact concrete facsimile of the two most decorated galleries, opened 200 metres from the original in 1983; a travelling version, Lascaux III, tours the world; and Lascaux IV, a full replica built from laser scans, opened at the foot of the hill in 2016.
The four discoverers — the youngest barely into his teens when he squeezed down the shaft — lived to see their adventure become a founding image of human culture — proof that art arrived not as a late refinement of civilisation but fully formed, in the dark, at the hands of people with no farms, no metal and no writing. The bulls survived the ice age, the centuries and the Occupation. What they very nearly did not survive was us. Since 1979 Lascaux has been part of a UNESCO World Heritage listing covering the prehistoric painted caves of the Vézère valley — a formal admission that the world's oldest masterpieces need protecting chiefly from their admirers.
Quiz nuggets
- Lascaux was found on 12 September 1940 by Marcel Ravidat, Jacques Marsal, Georges Agniel and Simon Coencas, after Ravidat's dog Robot located the hole.
- The paintings are about 17,000 years old (Magdalenian era): roughly 600 painted animals, horses most numerous, no reindeer.
- A Hall of the Bulls aurochs measures about 5.2m — the largest known animal figure in cave art; Abbé Breuil dubbed Lascaux the "Sistine Chapel of prehistory".
- Opened to tourists in 1948, ruined by algae and calcite, and closed by minister André Malraux in 1963.
- Lascaux II, a replica 200m away, opened in 1983; the full-cave replica Lascaux IV followed in 2016.