Lascaux
Six hundred paintings and 1,400 engravings fill a French cave, including a bull five metres long.
- When
- —
- Duration
- 200 years
- Known to
- ± 500 years
- Era
- Late Pleistocene, Quaternary
Discovered in 1940 by four teenagers following a dog down a hole, Lascaux contains some of the most accomplished Palaeolithic painting known: the Hall of the Bulls, the swimming stags, the enigmatic Shaft scene with a bird-headed man and a disembowelled bison. Scaffolding sockets show the artists built platforms to reach the ceiling, and they used stone lamps burning animal fat. Opened to tourists in 1948, the cave was closed in 1963 when visitors' breath began destroying the pigments.