The Cave Paintings of Lascaux
A painted horse in the Lascaux cave complex in southwestern France, created around 17,000 years ago.
Four teenagers and their dog stumbled onto the Lascaux cave in 1940 after following the dog down a hole left by a fallen tree, uncovering a gallery of some 6,000 painted and engraved figures — horses, aurochs, stags, and a scattering of enigmatic dots and signs whose meaning is still debated. Alongside sites like Altamira in Spain, Lascaux shows that Ice Age hunter-gatherers were already accomplished artists, mixing mineral pigments and using the cave walls' natural contours to give their animals a sense of motion. Public visits were closed in 1963 after algae and crystal growths, fed by visitors' breath, began damaging the pigments — today most people see only the precise facsimile built nearby, Lascaux II.
Public domain — source (Wikimedia Commons). Free to reuse under the stated licence.
