The Lascaux Paintings: 5 Facts About the Stunning Cave Art

On September 12, 1940—just months after Nazi Germany invaded their country—four French teenagers descended into a hillside cave near the town of Montignac. The boys, one of whom would soon be detained for being Jewish, reportedly hoped to find buried treasure. Instead, they discovered a vast collection of prehistoric art, dated to the height of the Ice Age around 21,000 years ago, that entirely changed how early humans are perceived.

The Lascaux cave, as it’s known, contains about 600 wall paintings and about 1,500 engravings etched on the sides of several chambers. Among the many animals depicted, horses are by far the most numerous, followed by stags, wild cattle, ibex and bison. There are also a smattering of carnivores, including bears and felines, and one human figure: a bird-headed (or bird-masked) man with an erect phallus that some believe is a shaman in a trance. Undeciphered signs decorate the walls as well, from simple dots and lines to more complex quadrangular and pentagonal shapes.

No evidence exists that people ever lived in the Lascaux cave, and it remains a mystery why prehistoric artists chose to decorate it. “One of the earliest ideas is that it was just art for art’s sake, that people have this innate need to express themselves artistically and that prehistoric people were no different,” says April Nowell, a Paleolithic archaeologist at the University of Victoria in Canada. In that sense, Lascaux would have been like an ancient museum or gallery.

Others theorize that Lascaux was used in hunting, fertility, initiation or religious ceremonies (or some combination), or to teach children about hunting. For her part, Nowell speculates that Lascaux and other prehistoric caves served as ritually important performative spaces, where various groups of hunter-gatherers could periodically come together. “I think a lot of these images are part of an oral storytelling tradition,” Nowell says.

As Nowell points out, there’s plenty of “bad art in the Paleolithic that we don’t see on the cover of textbooks.” But on the whole, Paleolithic (or Old Stone Age) artists hold their own against artists from far later eras. A 2012 study found that Paleolithic artists more accurately portrayed walking four-legged animals than their modern counterparts.

Paleolithic artists also understood perspective, which, as a 2008 New Yorker article points out, would not be rediscovered until the Athenian Golden Age. Nowell notes that they adjusted higher-up cave works so they looked better from the ground, and that they used the natural topography of the cave walls to create a sense of volume. “When we look at a flat painting from a later time period, it doesn’t have that same feeling, that life to it,” Nowell says.

Working by the light of fat-burning lamps, Lascaux’s artists knew how to use the flickering light to create the illusion of movement. “If you hold [the lamp] in just the right way, it really gives you the sense of the animal moving back and forth,” Nowell says. “People described it as prehistoric cinema in a way. And I love that idea.” She notes that this technique is even more pronounced at other prehistoric caves, including Chauvet cave, also in France, where a bison was drawn with eight legs to show it in motion.

At times, Paleolithic artists worked with stencils, and they also dabbled in what would later be called Pointillism. When Pablo Picasso visited Lascaux, he reportedly said, “They’ve invented everything.”

Lascaux has long been closed to the public to protect the art (though there is a replica cave nearby). Because she is a professional Paleolithic researcher, Nowell was granted permission to enter Lascaux in 1996. “You just feel a cavalcade of animals rushing toward you,” Nowell says. “It was like we had walked into the most sacred of synagogues or churches or mosques. When I tell my students about visiting it, I get goosebumps still.”

She says among her favorite artworks at Lascaux is a group of stags that “look like they might be going through water because you only see their heads in a line.” Other famous parts of Lascaux include the Hall of the Bulls and the Unicorn Panel. The largest animal at Lascaux, a bull, measures 17 feet long.

Lascaux’s artists used stone tools to engrave, and they used ground-up local minerals, like manganese and ochre, to draw and paint. Limited by the minerals they had access to, they mostly painted in black, brown, red and yellow, though a checkerboard coat of arms in the cave includes a shade of mauve.

It’s believed that Lascaux’s artists used flat stone palettes to mix their paint and then dabbed it on the cave walls with their fingers and animal-hair brushes. They also blew the paint through hollow bird bones (essentially an early form of spray painting) and drew with mineral crayons.

No natural light reaches inside Lascaux, so the artists depended on fat-burning lamps to see. Torches and hearths illuminated other decorated prehistoric caves, which have been found on every continent except Antarctica, but no evidence exists for them at Lascaux.

Perhaps most impressively, Lascaux’s artists seemingly erected scaffolding to reach the upper portions of the cave. Post holes and rope have been found on site. “The individual would have been lying on their back, very much like the Sistine Chapel,” Nowell says. “You have to be able to see the whole ceiling in your mind as you’re doing the work.” Like Altamira cave in Spain, Lascaux is sometimes referred to as the Sistine Chapel of the Paleolithic.

Lascaux was not the first prehistoric cave found brimming with art. But it helped prove that earlier finds, such as Altamira cave, were not modern forgeries, as many people had thought. It also revealed the full scale of prehistoric artistry.

“Lascaux at the time it was discovered was the most spectacular prehistoric cave ever seen, and it remained like that until Chauvet was discovered in the 90s,” Nowell says.

In addition to showcasing their artistic talents and technological innovations, Lascaux indicated that Ice Age hunter-gatherers cared about more than just their next meal. “We tend to think of prehistoric peoples as so serious all the time,” Nowell says. But the artwork reveals their sophisticated side, Nowell says, as well as their sense of humor.