Chauvet Cave

Three cavers exploring in their own time found the cave on 18 December 1994: Jean-Marie Chauvet, a Ministry of Culture contract officer who had watched over the Ardèche's painted caves since that July, Éliette Brunel, a winegrower, and Christian Hillaire, an EDF employee. A narrow opening in a cliff north of the cirque d'Estre led to a vestibule and a draught coming out of the rock; two charges opened the squeeze onto a shaft ten metres deep, and that evening they climbed down to two finger-drawn lines in the first gallery. They blocked the entrance again when they left.

Lyon's regional cultural affairs directorate was told on 28 December, though the law of 27 September 1941 required Chauvet to tell the mayor of Vallon-Pont-d'Arc at once. The Palaeolithic art specialist Jean Clottes inspected it on 29 December; his report of 2 January 1995 urged that it not be opened to the public, to avoid the mistakes that had damaged Lascaux. A protective door was fitted on 12 January and the discovery announced on 18 January.

About a thousand paintings and engravings are recorded, among them 447 animal figures, 355 identifiable with certainty. Big cats account for 21 per cent of those, mammoths and woolly rhinoceroses for 19 per cent each — a bestiary weighted towards predators rather than the horses and aurochs that dominate most Ice Age caves. One image, later overlaid by a sketch of a deer, resembles a volcano throwing out lava like those then active in the region; if the reading holds it would be the earliest known drawing of an eruption.

Walls were scraped clear before painting and outlines incised to suggest depth and movement; two woolly rhinoceroses butt horns in an apparent contest over territory or mating, a kind of scene rare in art this old. The later occupation left a child's footprints, charred hearths and torch smoke; the footprints may be the oldest human ones that can be dated accurately.

The cave and its surroundings were classified a historical monument on 13 October 1995; a ministerial order of 30 January 1995 declaring the excavations of public utility let the state expropriate the resident owners, and it became definitive owner on 14 February 1997. Compensation was first set as for unbuildable land; the owners fought through the courts until the Lyon appeal court ordered the state in May 2007 to pay €780,000, shared among fourteen owners and heirs. On 24 October 2011 the European Court of Human Rights held that the sum matched the value of what had been taken.

Three senior officials were convicted of forgery at Lyon on 18 July 1999 for backdating a prospecting permit to contest the discoverers' photographic rights over the paintings; a settlement of 15 February 2000 paid them three million francs and gave the cave Chauvet's name.

By 1999 thirty-one radiocarbon samples had been reported, the earliest at 32,900 ± 490 BP, and Jean Clottes concluded that the dates fell into two groups, around 32,000–30,000 BP and around 27,000–26,000 BP. Christian Züchner read the red paintings as Gravettian and the black as Early Magdalenian; others queried the charcoal's source and contamination. A 2012 study dated the rock-slide surfaces at the presumed only entrance by geomorphology and 36Cl, finding it sealed by a collapsing cliff about 29,000 years ago, in line with the radiocarbon range.

A 2016 study of 259 radiocarbon dates set out two phases of human presence, from 37,000 to 33,500 years ago and from 31,000 to 28,000, with all but two of the dates for the black drawings in the first; its authors take rockfalls to have sealed the cave at the end of each phase, after which neither people nor large animals entered until 1994. Recalibration with IntCal20 in 2020 put the oldest painting at 36,500 years old.

The cave has been closed to the public since 1994 and will not be opened: entry is through an airtight armoured door, in groups of five, and visitors number no more than about a hundred a year. Twice-yearly field missions have run since May 1998, directed by Jean Clottes until 2006 and then Jean-Michel Geneste. Dominique Baffier was appointed to oversee conservation in 2000, Marie Bardisa in 2014. On 22 June 2014 the World Heritage Committee, meeting in Doha, listed it unanimously as France's thirty-ninth such site.

The Caverne du Pont-d'Arc, a full-size facsimile nearby, opened on 25 April 2015; the largest cave replica built anywhere, ten times the size of the Lascaux one, it had drawn over three million visitors by July 2023.