40 Fun Facts About Lascaux

Which animal, the main food of Lascaux's painters judging by bones left in the cave, is almost absent from its walls?

Reindeer bones and antlers were left all over the cave, yet a lone figure in the Apse is the only one pictured: the walls were no menu.

Which animal is pictured most often at Lascaux, with more than 360 examples, far ahead of aurochs and ibexes?

Horses make up well over half of the precisely identified animals, and overlapping figures show they were always painted first.

In the best-known account of how Lascaux was found in 1940, which animal first led its owner to the hidden entrance?

A dog nosing at a hole left by an uprooted tree drew its owner to the spot, though the cave's official history mentions only a foxes' den.

Who found the painted cave of Lascaux in September 1940 after squeezing down a narrow hole on a hillside?

Four teenage boys, led by apprentice mechanic Marcel Ravidat, slid down the shaft and explored the passages by a makeshift light.

Lascaux closed to tourists in 1963 after 1,200 daily visitors raised levels of which damaging gas?

Carbon dioxide, heat and humidity from the crowds had visibly damaged the paintings within seven years of the cave's opening.

Which chamber of Lascaux holds the largest animal known in cave art, a painted figure 5.2 metres long?

The Hall of the Bulls sets huge black aurochs among 36 animals, all painted on a bright layer of white calcite.

The only human figure painted at Lascaux, a man lying at the bottom of the Shaft, has the head of which creature?

A bird also perches on a staff beside the fallen man, in a scene that no theory has convincingly explained.

Lascaux first opened to the public on 14 July 1948, a date France celebrates each year as which national holiday?

Bastille Day 1948 began fifteen years of mass tourism at the cave, with up to 1,200 people a day filing past the paintings.

Lascaux's best-known nickname, the title of a 1948 book of photographs, likens the cave to which landmark?

The Sistine Chapel of Prehistory was the title Fernand Windels, who photographed the paintings from 1940, gave his 1948 book.

How did Lascaux's painters apply colour to some walls, in a prehistoric version of spray painting?

Blowing it through a tube misted pigment onto crumbly rock that was too soft for a swab, with a hand or a cut hide as a stencil.

Lascaux lies in which department of southwestern France, a land of truffles, foie gras and prehistoric caves?

Dordogne roughly matches the old province of Périgord, and one stretch of its river valleys holds 37 decorated caves and rock shelters.

Which small town below the hill of Lascaux added the cave's name to its own official name in 2020?

Montignac became Montignac-Lascaux; the cave sits on a hill just outside the town, which also hosts the newest facsimile.

More than a hundred of which objects, most of them hollowed stone slabs, were found on the floors of Lascaux?

Lamps made the art possible, and the finest, carved from red sandstone with a handle, lay at the foot of the Shaft scene.

Charcoal was little used at Lascaux, so the black of its animals mostly comes from an oxide of which metal?

Manganese oxide is plentiful locally and was mined there for centuries under the name stone of Périgord.

Paintings up to 3.5 metres above the floor at Lascaux suggest that the artists sometimes built what?

Scaffolding is the likeliest answer: one researcher reported sockets for interlocked wooden beams high in the cave walls.

Which two animals, painted tail to tail in Lascaux's Nave, overlap at the rump to give an early illusion of depth?

Bison in this panel are parted by a slightly lighter border where the two black rumps overlap, so each body stays readable.

Which mythical nickname do archaeologists give a puzzling animal painted at Lascaux?

The Unicorn in fact has two straight lines rising from its forehead, and one theory reads it as a meat-eater drawn in disguise.

Lascaux's only picture of which predator hides inside the belly of a great painted aurochs, where it is easy to miss?

A bear tucked inside another figure fits a pattern: the cave's few meat-eaters are hidden, disguised or pushed into far corners.

Which priest, the leading cave-art expert of 1940, authenticated Lascaux's paintings nine days after their discovery?

Henri Breuil soon left for Africa, so he worked little on the cave himself and passed its study to a younger priest in 1952.

Before any expert saw Lascaux, its discoverers reported the paintings to Léon Laval, a local man of which profession?

Schoolteacher Léon Laval, a keen amateur archaeologist, climbed down within a week and helped look after the cave until it opened.

Local legend held that the hole leading into Lascaux was a secret tunnel running to which kind of building?

A manor house named Lascaux stood nearby, and the rumoured tunnel turned out to be a foxes' den above a painted cavern.

What job did discoverers Marcel Ravidat and Jacques Marsal take at Lascaux when the cave opened to visitors in 1948?

Guides Ravidat and Marsal knew the walls so well that they were the first to raise the alarm when the paintings began to suffer.

In 1951 charcoal from Lascaux went to Willard Libby's Chicago laboratory to be tested by which new method?

Radiocarbon dating was barely two years old; it placed the charcoal late in the last Ice Age and later won Libby a Nobel Prize.

Lascaux II, the replica opened in 1983, reproduces the cave's most famous chamber and which other painted section?

The Axial Gallery and the first great chamber were rebuilt as a reinforced-concrete shell, then repainted with natural pigments by the old methods.

What sets Lascaux III apart from the other reproductions of the cave made since 1983?

It travels the world as five portable panels copying the Nave and the Shaft, and has been on the road since 2012.

Lascaux IV, the complete replica opened near the cave in 2016, was designed by which Norwegian architecture firm?

Snøhetta, an Oslo practice, wrapped the full-scale copy in a museum of digital displays, workshops and films.

Lascaux's paintings were made by Ice Age hunter-gatherers in which period, long before farming or metalworking began?

Paleolithic art of this late phase also includes carved figures such as the Venus of Willendorf.

Which French cave, found in 1994 and filmed by Werner Herzog, holds paintings thousands of years older than Lascaux's?

Chauvet is named after Jean-Marie Chauvet, one of three cavers who explored it, and its art is dated to more than 30,000 years ago.

Decades before Lascaux was found, which Spanish cave's Ice Age paintings were dismissed by experts as modern forgeries?

Altamira's ceiling paintings were first noticed in 1879 by the eight-year-old daughter of the man digging there; sceptics backed down only in 1902.

Lascaux's Apse holds more than a thousand images made by which technique, suited to its soft, crumbling rock?

Engraving suited the friable right-hand side of the cave, and flint tools worn from cutting the lines were found on the floor.

Jean Clottes and David Lewis-Williams argued that cave art like Lascaux's was the work of which figures?

Shamans entering altered states is one theory among several; an older one read the animals as magic to bring luck in the hunt.

After a new air system was fitted at Lascaux in 2001, what kind of organism spread quickly over the ceiling and walls?

A fungus, the white mould Fusarium solani, had been lying in the cave soil; darker moulds later left grey and black blemishes on the walls.

Which nickname is given to the coloured checkerboard signs painted in Lascaux's Nave, one of them partly in mauve?

Coats of arms was the name an early expert gave the grids, whose touch of mauve is a rare break from the cave's blacks, reds and yellows.

Which French writer published a 1955 book arguing that art itself was born on the walls of Lascaux?

Georges Bataille called it Lascaux, or the Birth of Art; fellow writer Maurice Blanchot later took up its argument in his own book L'Amitié.

Lascaux, like the cliffs that line the surrounding river valley, is hollowed out of which type of rock?

Limestone here is partly covered by white calcite, which gave the painters of the first chamber a bright, reflective surface.

In the Shaft scene at Lascaux, which animal, pictured only once in the cave, walks away from the fallen man?

A rhinoceros moves off to the left, trailed by three pairs of dots, a sign repeated in the cave's most remote corner.

Which term do archaeologists use for art on cave walls like Lascaux's, as opposed to carved objects that can be carried?

Parietal art gives its name to the International Centre for Parietal Art, the museum built around the newest full copy of the cave.

Which organisation added Lascaux and the other decorated caves of its valley to a list of protected world sites in 1979?

UNESCO put Lascaux on the World Heritage List as one of a group of prehistoric sites in the same valley, not on its own.

Roughly how old are Lascaux's paintings, made when ice sheets still covered much of northern Europe?

About 20,000 years is the usual round figure; estimates, still argued over, run from roughly 17,000 to 23,000 years.

Lascaux's reds and yellows come from the minerals hematite and goethite, which are oxides of which metal?

Iron oxides gave the warm half of a narrow palette: besides black, the painters had only dark brown, red and yellow.