ART × BELIEFS

Lascaux Cave

~21,000 years ago

Palaeolithic · Upper Palaeolithic · Last glacial · Last Glacial Maximum

Lascaux is a decorated cave in the Dordogne, in south-western France, found in 1940 and closed to visitors in 1963. Painted and engraved animals cover its galleries, which carry names taken from what they hold, among them the Hall of the Bulls. Dating the walls directly is rarely possible here: cave art in this region has been held to be made only from mineral colouring matter, and a mineral pigment holds no carbon for radiocarbon to measure. The chronology therefore rests on what people left on the ground. Five reindeer remains were taken from the main galleries and sent for accelerator dating; four yielded results, closely matching, centred on 17,600 radiocarbon years, about 21,500 to 21,000 calibrated years before present. These ages contradict the scattered and mutually inconsistent measurements made between 1948 and 2002, and agree with the tool types found in the cave.

Why it matters

Two distant moments of European cave art can be set side by side on firmer ground: Chauvet, in the Ardeche, decorated around 36,000 years ago, and Lascaux around 21,000, some fifteen millennia apart. Lascaux also became a lesson in conservation. Heavy visiting after its discovery disturbed the climate inside; the cave was closed in 1963 after algae spread over the walls, the fungus Fusarium solani colonised ceiling and sediments in 2001, and the biocides applied against it selected for bacteria pathogenic to humans.

Dating & uncertainty

The four ages date reindeer bones left in the cave by people, not the paintings, and their authors expressly place the link between the two outside the scope of their study. If the art was made during those visits, it is about 21,500 to 21,000 years old. If the cave was entered on more than one occasion, the paintings may be older or younger than the bones, and the chronological framework of Lascaux remains, in those authors' own words, highly controversial. The bounds kept here, 22,000 to 19,000 years, hold that uncertainty open.

Sources

1. Ducasse et al. (2019), Paléo · Twenty years on, a new date with Lascaux. Reassessing the chronology of the cave's Paleolithic occupations through new 14C AMS datingdoi:10.4000/paleo.4558
2. Reiche et al. (2023), Scientific Reports · First discovery of charcoal-based prehistoric cave art in Dordognedoi:10.1038/s41598-023-47652-1
3. Bastian et al. (2010), Microbiology · The microbiology of Lascaux Cavedoi:10.1099/mic.0.036160-0
4. Geneste (2017), Archaeology, Ethnology and Anthropology of Eurasia · From Chauvet to Lascaux: 15,000 Years of Cave Artdoi:10.17746/1563-0110.2017.45.3.029-040

Our species’ history as one day

22:24:001 h 36 min before midnight

if the 315,000 years of Homo sapiens were compressed into a single day