Lascaux: The Teenagers Who Found Ice Age Paintings Under a Fallen Tree

On a September day in 1940, an 18-year-old named Marcel Ravidat was walking in the woods above the small town of Montignac, in the Dordogne region of south-west France. Near the top of the hill, where a tree had been torn up by its roots, there was a hole in the ground. Stones dropped into it fell for a long time.

A few days later he came back with three younger friends, a lamp and a knife. What they found at the bottom has been called the Sistine Chapel of prehistory.

A hole in the woods

There are several versions of what happened next, told by the boys themselves over the years. In most of them Ravidat's dog, Robot, plays a part, and in the popular version the dog finds the hole or falls into it. What is clear is that on 12 September 1940, Ravidat returned with Jacques Marsal, Georges Agnel and Simon Coencas. They widened the opening and slid down a slope of loose earth into the dark.

At the bottom, by the light of their lamp, they saw animals on the walls. Horses, deer and huge bulls in red, yellow and black ran across the rock above their heads.

France was at war, and the Dordogne was in the unoccupied zone. The boys kept the secret for a few days, then told their schoolteacher, Léon Laval. He contacted experts, and on 21 September the prehistorian Abbé Henri Breuil arrived to see the cave. He confirmed that the paintings were genuine and extremely old.

What is on the walls

Lascaux is not a single painted room but a series of chambers and passages, each now known by a descriptive name. The first and most famous is the Hall of the Bulls, where four enormous black aurochs, a species of wild cattle now extinct, stride across the ceiling among horses and deer. The largest is more than five metres long.

Beyond it, the Axial Gallery is a narrow passage whose walls and ceiling are crowded with images, including a so-called Chinese horse and a red cow leaping across the rock. Other passages, called the Nave, the Apse and the Chamber of Felines, contain hundreds more images, many of them engraved rather than painted.

By common counts, the cave contains about 600 painted and drawn animals and nearly 1,500 engravings, along with many abstract signs: dots, grids and lines whose meaning is unknown. Horses are the most common animal, followed by stags, aurochs, ibex and bison. There are very few carnivores and almost no people.

The one striking exception is in a deep pit called the Shaft. There, a simple stick-like human figure with a bird-like head appears to fall backwards in front of a wounded bison. Beside them are a bird on a stick and a rhinoceros. No one knows what the scene means, and it has been interpreted as a hunting accident, a myth or a shaman's vision.

How they were painted

The artists used minerals for colour. Reds and yellows come from iron oxides, the earth pigments known as ochres, and blacks mostly from manganese oxides. Pigments were ground, sometimes mixed with clay or other minerals, and applied with brushes, pads, fingers, or blown through hollow bones or reeds to create spray effects.

The artists also used the shape of the rock. A bulge in the wall becomes the belly of an animal; a crack becomes a ground line. Some figures appear to move when lit by a flickering flame.

Light came from fire. Archaeologists have found dozens of stone lamps at Lascaux, most of them simple hollowed stones, along with one finely carved red sandstone lamp found in the Shaft. They burned animal fat with a wick of plant material. To reach the higher parts of the Axial Gallery, the painters appear to have built scaffolding: holes cut into the rock on both sides of the passage likely held wooden beams.

When were they made?

Radiocarbon dating of charcoal and other material from the cave points to around 17,000 years ago, in the Upper Palaeolithic, when much of northern Europe was in the grip of the last Ice Age. Researchers debate the exact span and whether all the images were made in a single period. Most place them in the early Magdalenian culture, or at the transition from the Solutrean to the Magdalenian.

The animals on the walls match the Ice Age fauna of the region. Reindeer bones are common at sites of the time, yet reindeer are almost absent from the paintings. Whatever the artists were doing, it was not simply recording a menu.

A cave loved too much

After the war, the owners prepared the cave for visitors. The entrance was enlarged, stairs and a heavy door were installed, and the floor was lowered in places. Lascaux opened to the public in 1948 and quickly became one of France's most popular attractions, with more than a thousand visitors a day at its peak.

Every one of them brought warmth, moisture and carbon dioxide into a cave that had been sealed for thousands of years. Lights and air systems added to the problem. By the late 1950s, patches of green algae were spreading across the walls, a problem nicknamed the green sickness, along with white crystalline deposits of calcite.

In April 1963, France's Minister of Culture, André Malraux, closed the cave to the public. The algae was treated and the climate stabilised, but problems have continued. In the 2000s, outbreaks of white fungus and later black spots of mould required new treatments. Today the cave is entered only by a small number of scientists and conservators, for limited periods, under strict monitoring.

The replicas

Rather than reopen the cave, France built copies. Lascaux II, opened in 1983 a short walk from the original entrance, reproduces the Hall of the Bulls and the Axial Gallery, painted by hand using the same kinds of pigments. A travelling exhibition, Lascaux III, has toured the world since 2012. In December 2016, Lascaux IV, the International Centre for Cave Art, opened at the foot of the hill in Montignac. It reproduces almost the entire cave at full scale, using 3D scans to copy every bump in the rock.

What happened to the boys

The four friends' lives took different paths. Jacques Marsal and Marcel Ravidat both returned to Lascaux after the war and worked at the cave, guiding and guarding it for years. In later life the surviving discoverers were honoured guests at anniversaries of the find.

Lascaux was inscribed as a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1979, alongside other decorated caves and prehistoric sites of the Vézère Valley. It is not the oldest cave art in the world, as is sometimes claimed. But few sites have shaped our picture of the Ice Age as powerfully as the animals that four teenagers saw by lamplight in 1940.