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—— ON THIS DAY ——
SEPTEMBER 12, 1940
Montignac, Dordogne, France
86 years ago
The Lascaux cave in southwestern France, discovered on September 12, 1940, whose walls carry roughly six hundred painted animals made in the Upper Paleolithic.
On September 12, 1940, four teenagers from the area around Montignac in the Dordogne climbed down a narrow shaft in the woods above the town. Marcel Ravidat, an eighteen-year-old apprentice mechanic, had noticed the opening a few days earlier, left by an uprooted tree, and had come back with three friends, Jacques Marsal, Georges Agnel, and Simon Coencas. Local legend held that a secret passage led to a nearby manor, and the boys thought they might have found it, possibly with treasure at the end.
They widened the hole, dropped down a scree slope, and lit a makeshift lamp. What the light showed on the walls of the gallery ahead of them was not treasure in the sense they had imagined. It was a procession of animals: aurochs, horses, stags, bison, ibex, painted and engraved in black, red, yellow, and brown across the rock. The cave they had entered contained roughly six hundred painted figures and nearly fifteen hundred engravings, made by people living in the region about seventeen thousand years ago.
—— MARQUEE EVENT ——
Upper Paleolithic cave painting, the tradition of image-making in European caves between roughly forty thousand and twelve thousand years ago, of which Lascaux is among the most spectacular examples.
The discovery came at an unlikely moment. France had surrendered to Germany in June, and the country was under occupation. Two of the four boys, Agnel and Coencas, left within days as the war closed in on their families; Coencas and his relatives were Jewish, and members of his family were later deported. Ravidat and Marsal stayed near the cave through the winter, effectively guarding it, and both later worked as guides when it opened to visitors.
The paintings themselves are extraordinary in their technique. Artists used the natural contours of the rock to give volume to the animals, applied pigment by blowing it through tubes as well as by hand, and built scaffolding to reach the ceilings. Sockets cut into the walls of the Nave show where the timbers were set. The largest figure, a bull in the chamber known as the Hall of the Bulls, is more than five metres long. What the images meant remains unresolved. Hunting magic, ritual, seasonal record, teaching, and shamanic practice have all been proposed, and none can be confirmed.
Lascaux opened to the public in 1948 and was quickly overwhelmed. Well over a thousand visitors a day breathed carbon dioxide and moisture into a space that had been sealed for millennia. Algae spread across the walls and calcite crystals formed over the images. The cave was closed to the public in 1963 by the culture minister André Malraux, and it has since fought continuing battles with fungal and microbial outbreaks. Facsimiles have been built nearby, culminating in a full replica opened in 2016. The originals are seen now only by a handful of specialists on strictly limited visits.
—— WHY THIS MATTERS ——
It is among the finest surviving evidence of Paleolithic art. The scale, technique, and preservation of the Lascaux paintings transformed the understanding of what people were capable of seventeen thousand years ago, and undercut any notion that sophisticated art began with settled civilization.
Its damage changed how heritage sites are managed. Fifteen years of mass tourism did more harm than fifteen thousand years of sealed darkness. The closure of Lascaux and the building of replicas set the model for protecting fragile sites while still giving the public access.
It leaves a question nobody has answered. Why people went deep underground, built scaffolding, and painted animals in places almost nobody would see is still unknown. The images are entirely legible as pictures and entirely opaque as intent.
—— THE TAKEAWAY ——
On September 12, 1940, four teenagers in occupied France squeezed down a hole looking for buried treasure and found a cave covered in paintings made seventeen thousand years ago. Opened to visitors in 1948, it was being destroyed by their breath within fifteen years. It has been closed since 1963, and what the paintings were for is still unknown.
—— QUOTE OF THE DAY ——
“We saw the animals and we understood at once that this was something very old and very great.”
— A recollection attributed to one of the four discoverers of Lascaux
—— OUR QUIZ OF THE DAY ——
How much do you know about the discovery of Lascaux, the boys who found it, the techniques used by the painters, and the damage that closed the cave?
