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Plate 1 A painted aurochs bull in profile, its outline and horns drawn in thick strokes

Lascaux cave paintings

Hundreds of painted and engraved animals, horses above all, on the walls of Lascaux, a cave above Montignac in the Dordogne, France. They were made more than 20,000 years ago and found by four teenagers in 1940. The cave has been closed to the public since 1963.

Cave and rock art. Also called lascaux, lascaux cave, lascaux paintings.

Meaning

Lascaux is a cave in the Vézère valley of south-west France whose walls carry some 600 animals, by the count of France’s Ministry of Culture. Horses are by far the most numerous, followed by stags and aurochs in equal numbers, then ibexes and bison. Bears and felines are few and sit in the furthest corners; the ministry suggests the painters hid carnivores away, as with a bear tucked inside the belly of a large aurochs, and that the figure called the Unicorn may be one in disguise. There is a single human figure, in the scene at the bottom of the Shaft; the rest of the walls carry animals and signs. The cave is small: its accessible passages add up to no more than 235 metres, traditionally divided into seven parts, from the Hall of the Bulls and the Axial Gallery to the Apse and the Shaft. What sets it apart is the painting itself. The ministry notes that most Palaeolithic wall art is drawn or engraved, and that painting on this scale is otherwise found in France only at Font-de-Gaume and in a few caves in the Pyrenees. The painters needed little: flints, blocks of pigment, grinding stones, brushes and swabs, stencils cut from hide or, more often, their own hands, and water to bind the local pigment. No living tradition claims Lascaux. The French state owns it and keeps it closed; the public sees it through copies.

Origin and history

Lascaux was found in the late summer of 1940. Halfway up the hill above Montignac was a foxes’ den that local legend said opened into a passage to the Lascaux manor, and Marcel Ravidat, a 17-year-old apprentice mechanic, made a first attempt to explore it. On 12 September he came back with three other boys, Jacques Marsal, Georges Agniel and Simon Coencas, enlarged the hole and slid down a shaft. By the light of a makeshift lamp they followed a gallery some thirty metres long and saw the first paintings in what is now the Axial Gallery. The next day Ravidat lowered himself on a rope down an eight-metre shaft and found the scene of a man facing a bison. The boys told their teacher, Léon Laval, who went down on 18 September, and within days the prehistorian Henri Breuil, who had taken refuge in the region, came to authenticate the figures. Two days after the discovery Agniel and Coencas had to leave; Coencas and his family were deported to Buchenwald. The four friends met again only in November 1986.

Work to open the cave to visitors was finished in 1948, and Ravidat and Marsal became its guides. They were the first to point out green algae spreading on the walls, in 1958 and 1959. The cave was closed to the public in 1963, and Marsal became its guardian. UNESCO records a fresh biological outbreak in 2000 and the “brown marks” it left, which touch only a minimal part of the painted surface. The ministry describes the cave as relatively stable but fragile, says its closure “is now considered by all to be necessary for its conservation”, and spends €600,000 a year on research and care.

The public sees copies. Lascaux II, dug into the same hill and opened in 1983, reproduces the Hall of the Bulls and the Axial Gallery and has had some 10 million visitors. Lascaux III, a travelling exhibition since 2012, recreates the Nave and the Shaft. Lascaux IV, the International Centre for Parietal Art at Montignac, opened in December 2016 around an almost complete copy of the cave.

How old are the paintings?

Somewhere between about 23,000 and 21,000 years old, and the two ends of that range rest on different evidence. The first radiocarbon date for Lascaux, run in 1951 on charcoal from the Shaft in W. Frank Libby’s laboratory in Chicago, came out at around 19,000 years and placed the cave in the Magdalenian. In 1998 and 2002 new dates on reindeer antler came out older, between 23,500 and 22,000 years ago, and Norbert Aujoulat read the style of the figures as Solutrean. The LAsCO project then re-dated reindeer bone from the main parts of the cave and placed the human visits between 21,500 and 21,000 years ago, between the Badegoulian and the Magdalenian, 1,000 to 1,500 years later than the dates of the late 1990s. The Ministry of Culture’s site carries both answers: its dating page reports the LAsCO result, while its summary still says the cave “dates from 23,000 years ago” and was painted by people of the Solutrean culture. The dates come from bone, antler and charcoal left in the cave, not from the paint, and the ministry itself asks whether everything found there can be assumed to be of one time.

A hundred animals, or six hundred?

The two official descriptions disagree. UNESCO’s World Heritage listing for the Vézère valley describes hunting scenes with “close to one hundred animal figures”. France’s Ministry of Culture counts some 600 representations of animals.

Horses first, then aurochs, then stags

Norbert Aujoulat, who studied the cave from 1988 to 1999, found that every panel was built in the same order: horses first, then aurochs, then stags. He read the animals’ coats and condition as seasons, the horses in early spring, the aurochs in summer and the stags in autumn, each at the start of its mating time, and took the panels as a picture of the turning year. The ministry sets his reading beside older ones. Hunting magic came from bison in caves of the Ariège marked with arrow-like signs, and faded as so few marked animals turned up elsewhere. Fertility and totemism, it says, have no more support. André Leroi-Gourhan used statistics to argue that each kind of animal and sign had its own place in a cave, and in the late 1990s Jean Clottes and David Lewis-Williams proposed that the paintings came from shamanism.

Lamps in the dark

Over a hundred lamps have been found in Lascaux. Most are limestone slabs with a shallow hollow for fuel. One, found by André Glory at the foot of the Shaft Scene, is red sandstone, polished, with a handle and engraved decoration.

See also

Altamira Cave, Cueva de las Manos (hand stencils), Cave art signs, Venus of Willendorf, Lion Man, Petroglyphs.

Sources

  1. The discovery (Lascaux, Ministère de la Culture), Ministère de la Culture, Lascaux: “The discovery”, Ministère de la Culture (France), History › The discovery
  2. The four discoverers (Lascaux, Ministère de la Culture), Ministère de la Culture, Lascaux: “The four discoverers”, Ministère de la Culture (France), Resources › Biographies
  3. The initial studies (Lascaux, Ministère de la Culture), Ministère de la Culture, Lascaux: “The initial studies”, Ministère de la Culture (France), History › The initial studies
  4. The Lascaux cave (Lascaux, Ministère de la Culture), Ministère de la Culture, Lascaux: “The Lascaux cave”, Ministère de la Culture (France), The Setting › The Lascaux cave
  5. Themes (Lascaux, Ministère de la Culture), Ministère de la Culture, Lascaux: “Themes”, Ministère de la Culture (France), Parietal art › Themes
  6. The techniques (Lascaux, Ministère de la Culture), Ministère de la Culture, Lascaux: “The techniques”, Ministère de la Culture (France), Parietal art › The techniques
  7. Lighting (Lascaux, Ministère de la Culture), Ministère de la Culture, Lascaux: “Lighting”, Ministère de la Culture (France), Parietal art › Lighting
  8. Dating the figures at Lascaux (Ministère de la Culture), Ministère de la Culture, Lascaux: “Dating the figures at Lascaux”, Ministère de la Culture (France), Archaeological research › Dating the figures
  9. Interpretations (Lascaux, Ministère de la Culture), Ministère de la Culture, Lascaux: “Interpretations”, Ministère de la Culture (France), Archaeological research › Interpretations
  10. A strong state commitment (Lascaux, Ministère de la Culture), Ministère de la Culture, Lascaux: “A Strong State Commitment”, Ministère de la Culture (France), Conservation & Perspectives
  11. Lascaux II and III (Lascaux, Ministère de la Culture), Ministère de la Culture, Lascaux: “Lascaux II & III”, Ministère de la Culture (France), Visit the Replicas
  12. Lascaux IV (Lascaux, Ministère de la Culture), Ministère de la Culture, Lascaux: “Lascaux IV”, Ministère de la Culture (France), Visit the Replicas
  13. Prehistoric Sites and Decorated Caves of the Vézère Valley (UNESCO), UNESCO World Heritage List, property 85, “Prehistoric Sites and Decorated Caves of the Vézère Valley”, UNESCO World Heritage Centre, Brief synthesis; Criterion (i); Authenticity

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Researched, edited and approved by Rory Hansen before publishing. Last reviewed October 8, 2026. How we research

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