Lascaux

Lascaux is a cave system on a hillside above the village of Montignac, in the Dordogne department of south-western France, whose walls and ceilings carry more than 600 paintings and many hundreds of engravings made by Upper Palaeolithic hunter-gatherers. The images, mostly of large animals, are now usually dated to between about 17,000 and 22,000 years ago, in the early Magdalenian period, though the dating is still debated. Found by teenagers in 1940, Lascaux became the best-known decorated cave in the world, and its fragility has shaped how such caves are protected ever since.

The decoration is the work of many generations. Altogether the cave holds nearly 6,000 figures, falling into three broad groups: animals, human figures and abstract signs. More than 900 can be recognised as animals; horses are by far the most common, followed by stags, with aurochs and bison each making up a small share, and a handful of felines, a bear, a bird and a rhinoceros. Reindeer, although they were the artists' main source of food, are almost absent, and there are no fish, plants or landscapes.

The painters used red, yellow and black pigments made from iron oxides such as ochre and haematite and from manganese minerals, with charcoal used only sparingly. Colour was dabbed on as a paste or blown through a tube, and where the rock was soft, figures were scratched into it.

The most celebrated chamber, the Hall of the Bulls, has walls of calcite too hard to engrave, so it was only painted. Four great black aurochs dominate it; one is about 5.2 metres long, the largest animal yet known in cave art. In a different style, at the bottom of a shaft some nine metres deep, is the cave's only human figure: a bird-headed man who appears to lie before a wounded bison, a scene that has been read in many ways.

Why the paintings were made is unknown, and specialists warn that modern assumptions easily colour any reading. Some anthropologists and art historians have seen them as records of past hunts or as magic to bring success in future ones. André Leroi-Gourhan, who studied the cave from the 1960s, proposed a structuralist scheme in which animals and signs were arranged around a male and female duality. David Lewis-Williams and Jean Clottes, drawing on the San rock art of southern Africa, have argued that such art grew out of visions experienced in ritual trance.

The entrance was found on 12 September 1940 by 18-year-old Marcel Ravidat after his dog explored a hole left by a fallen tree. He came back with Jacques Marsal, Georges Agnel and Simon Coencas, three friends, and the four slid down a shaft some 15 metres deep into the painted galleries. On 21 September the prehistorian Henri Breuil came to see the cave; his sketches remain valuable because so much of the paint has since faded.

Lascaux was opened to visitors on 14 July 1948, after the end of the Second World War. By 1955 the breath, heat and humidity of about 1,200 visitors a day were visibly harming the paintings, and lichens and crystals began to spread across the walls. In 1963 the cave was shut to visitors. A new air-conditioning system installed in 2001 was followed by an outbreak of white mould, treated with quicklime, and later by grey and black fungi that left stains on the walls. Access has since been limited to a few specialists for a few days a month, and an international scientific committee now advises on the cave's care. The artist Pablo Picasso is reported to have said after a visit that "we have learned nothing in twelve thousand years".

To let the public see the art without endangering it, a copy of the Hall of the Bulls and the Painted Gallery, Lascaux II, opened near the original in 1983. Travelling replicas known as Lascaux III have toured abroad since 2012, and a full-scale reproduction of the entire cave, Lascaux IV, opened in December 2016 within the International Centre for Parietal Art on the same hill. In 1979 UNESCO added Lascaux to its World Heritage List within the Prehistoric Sites and Decorated Caves of the Vézère Valley, an area with one of the densest concentrations of Upper Palaeolithic sites in Europe.