Lascaux
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40 free Lascaux trivia questions with answers — history quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
Lascaux is the most famous painted cave in the world: a short network of galleries in southwestern France whose walls are crowded with animals drawn by people who lived during the last Ice Age. It was found by accident in 1940, opened to the public a few years later, and then had to be shut again when the art began to suffer. This quiz covers the whole story. You will meet the discoverers and the first experts on the scene, walk through the named chambers and their best-known panels, and look at how the artists worked: their pigments, their light, their tricks for showing depth. Later questions turn to the theories about what the pictures meant, the long fight to conserve them, and the copies that visitors see today. It is pitched for art history students revising cave art, for visitors planning a trip to the region, and for anyone who likes a good origin story. Every answer comes with a short explanation.
30 of 40 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Which animal, the main food of Lascaux's painters judging by bones left in the cave, is almost absent from its walls?
Reindeer
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.
Q 02Which animal is pictured most often at Lascaux, with more than 360 examples, far ahead of aurochs and ibexes?
Horses
Horses make up well over half of the precisely identified animals, and overlapping figures show they were always painted first.
Q 03In the best-known account of how Lascaux was found in 1940, which animal first led its owner to the hidden entrance?
A dog
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.
Q 04Who found the painted cave of Lascaux in September 1940 after squeezing down a narrow hole on a hillside?
Four teenage boys
Four teenage boys, led by apprentice mechanic Marcel Ravidat, slid down the shaft and explored the passages by a makeshift light.
Q 05Lascaux closed to tourists in 1963 after 1,200 daily visitors raised levels of which damaging gas?
Carbon dioxide
Carbon dioxide, heat and humidity from the crowds had visibly damaged the paintings within seven years of the cave's opening.
Q 06Which chamber of Lascaux holds the largest animal known in cave art, a painted figure 5.2 metres long?
Hall of the Bulls
The Hall of the Bulls sets huge black aurochs among 36 animals, all painted on a bright layer of white calcite.
Q 07The only human figure painted at Lascaux, a man lying at the bottom of the Shaft, has the head of which creature?
A bird
A bird also perches on a staff beside the fallen man, in a scene that no theory has convincingly explained.
Q 08Lascaux first opened to the public on 14 July 1948, a date France celebrates each year as which national holiday?
Bastille Day
Bastille Day 1948 began fifteen years of mass tourism at the cave, with up to 1,200 people a day filing past the paintings.
Q 09Lascaux's best-known nickname, the title of a 1948 book of photographs, likens the cave to which landmark?
The Sistine Chapel
The Sistine Chapel of Prehistory was the title Fernand Windels, who photographed the paintings from 1940, gave his 1948 book.
Q 10How did Lascaux's painters apply colour to some walls, in a prehistoric version of spray painting?
Blowing it through a tube
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.
Q 11Lascaux lies in which department of southwestern France, a land of truffles, foie gras and prehistoric caves?
Dordogne
Dordogne roughly matches the old province of Périgord, and one stretch of its river valleys holds 37 decorated caves and rock shelters.
Q 12Which small town below the hill of Lascaux added the cave's name to its own official name in 2020?
Montignac
Montignac became Montignac-Lascaux; the cave sits on a hill just outside the town, which also hosts the newest facsimile.
Q 13More than a hundred of which objects, most of them hollowed stone slabs, were found on the floors of Lascaux?
Lamps
Lamps made the art possible, and the finest, carved from red sandstone with a handle, lay at the foot of the Shaft scene.
Q 21Local legend held that the hole leading into Lascaux was a secret tunnel running to which kind of building?
A manor house
A manor house named Lascaux stood nearby, and the rumoured tunnel turned out to be a foxes' den above a painted cavern.
Q 22What job did discoverers Marcel Ravidat and Jacques Marsal take at Lascaux when the cave opened to visitors in 1948?
Guides
Guides Ravidat and Marsal knew the walls so well that they were the first to raise the alarm when the paintings began to suffer.
Q 23In 1951 charcoal from Lascaux went to Willard Libby's Chicago laboratory to be tested by which new method?
Radiocarbon dating
Q 14Charcoal was little used at Lascaux, so the black of its animals mostly comes from an oxide of which metal?
Manganese
Manganese oxide is plentiful locally and was mined there for centuries under the name stone of Périgord.
Q 15Paintings up to 3.5 metres above the floor at Lascaux suggest that the artists sometimes built what?
Scaffolding
Scaffolding is the likeliest answer: one researcher reported sockets for interlocked wooden beams high in the cave walls.
Q 16Which two animals, painted tail to tail in Lascaux's Nave, overlap at the rump to give an early illusion of depth?
Bison
Bison in this panel are parted by a slightly lighter border where the two black rumps overlap, so each body stays readable.
Q 17Which mythical nickname do archaeologists give a puzzling animal painted at Lascaux?
The Unicorn
The Unicorn in fact has two straight lines rising from its forehead, and one theory reads it as a meat-eater drawn in disguise.
Q 18Lascaux's only picture of which predator hides inside the belly of a great painted aurochs, where it is easy to miss?
A bear
A bear tucked inside another figure fits a pattern: the cave's few meat-eaters are hidden, disguised or pushed into far corners.
Q 19Which priest, the leading cave-art expert of 1940, authenticated Lascaux's paintings nine days after their discovery?
Henri Breuil
Henri Breuil soon left for Africa, so he worked little on the cave himself and passed its study to a younger priest in 1952.
Q 20Before any expert saw Lascaux, its discoverers reported the paintings to Léon Laval, a local man of which profession?
Schoolteacher
Schoolteacher Léon Laval, a keen amateur archaeologist, climbed down within a week and helped look after the cave until it opened.
Radiocarbon dating was barely two years old; it placed the charcoal late in the last Ice Age and later won Libby a Nobel Prize.
Q 24Lascaux II, the replica opened in 1983, reproduces the cave's most famous chamber and which other painted section?
The Axial Gallery
The Axial Gallery and the first great chamber were rebuilt as a reinforced-concrete shell, then repainted with natural pigments by the old methods.
Q 25What sets Lascaux III apart from the other reproductions of the cave made since 1983?
It travels the world
It travels the world as five portable panels copying the Nave and the Shaft, and has been on the road since 2012.
Q 26Lascaux IV, the complete replica opened near the cave in 2016, was designed by which Norwegian architecture firm?
Snøhetta
Snøhetta, an Oslo practice, wrapped the full-scale copy in a museum of digital displays, workshops and films.
Q 27Lascaux's paintings were made by Ice Age hunter-gatherers in which period, long before farming or metalworking began?
Paleolithic
Paleolithic art of this late phase also includes carved figures such as the Venus of Willendorf.
Q 28Which French cave, found in 1994 and filmed by Werner Herzog, holds paintings thousands of years older than Lascaux's?
Chauvet
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.
Q 29Decades before Lascaux was found, which Spanish cave's Ice Age paintings were dismissed by experts as modern forgeries?
Altamira
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.
Q 30Lascaux's Apse holds more than a thousand images made by which technique, suited to its soft, crumbling rock?
Engraving
Engraving suited the friable right-hand side of the cave, and flint tools worn from cutting the lines were found on the floor.