Lascaux

On 12 September 1940, eighteen-year-old Marcel Ravidat discovered the cave's entrance on the La Rochefoucauld-Montbel estate near Montignac when his dog investigated a hole left by an uprooted tree. He returned with three friends, Jacques Marsal, Georges Agnel and Simon Coencas, and the four entered through a fifteen-metre shaft they believed might lead to a legendary secret passage connecting to the nearby Lascaux Manor. Instead they found the walls covered with painted animals, in chambers later named the Hall of the Bulls, the Passageway, the Shaft, the Nave, the Apse and the Chamber of Felines. On 21 September the group returned with the prehistorian Abbé Henri Breuil, accompanied by Denis Peyrony, curator of the National Museum of Prehistory at Les Eyzies, Jean Bouyssonie and Dr Cheynier; Breuil's sketches of the cave remain study material today because so many of the paintings have since degraded.

The cave was opened to the public on 14 July 1948, and archaeological investigation of the Shaft began the following year. By 1955 the carbon dioxide, heat and humidity exhaled by around 1,200 visitors a day had visibly damaged the walls, and fungi and lichen began infesting the surfaces as the air condition deteriorated. The cave was closed to the public in 1963, the paintings were restored as far as possible to their original state, and a daily monitoring system was introduced.

Lascaux holds nearly 6,000 figures. Of the roughly 900 that read as animals, 605 have been precisely identified, including 364 horses and 90 stags, with aurochs and bison each accounting for four to five per cent of the images. The cave's single human figure, painted in a strikingly different style from the animals, lies at the bottom of a nine-metre well. In the Hall of the Bulls, four black aurochs dominate a frieze of 36 animals; one measures 5.2 metres, the largest animal so far found in cave art. The paintings' age is debated but is now usually put at 17,000 to 22,000 years, in the early Magdalenian. Visiting in the mid-20th century, Pablo Picasso is said to have remarked on leaving that 'we have learned nothing in twelve thousand years.'

The cave was classified a historic monument on 27 December 1940, months after its discovery, with further parcels of the surrounding land added to the listing on 8 May and 5 September 1962. In 1979 it was inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage List as part of the Prehistoric Sites and Decorated Caves of the Vézère Valley.

A new air-conditioning system was installed in 2001; an outbreak of the white mould Fusarium solani followed across the cave, and was treated with quicklime. A second fungus producing grey and black blemishes appeared in 2007. In January 2008 authorities closed the cave even to scientists for three months, permitting only a single monitor inside for twenty minutes a week. An international symposium on subterranean conservation, chaired by the prehistorian Jean Clottes, met in Paris in February 2009 with nearly 300 participants from seventeen countries; by 2011, after a stricter programme, the fungus was reported to be in retreat. In May 2018 a newly identified species isolated from the cave was named Scolecobasidium lascauxense after it. The mould problem remains unresolved, and only a handful of scientists are now allowed inside, for a few days a month.

Facsimiles have carried Lascaux's imagery to the public since the original was sealed. Lascaux II, an exact copy of the Hall of the Bulls and the Painted Gallery made with the iron oxide, charcoal and ochre pigments believed to have been used 19,000 years ago, opened at the Grand Palais in Paris before being installed from 1983 about 200 metres from the original cave. Lascaux III, a set of five touring reproductions of the Nave and the Shaft, has travelled to various countries since 2012. Lascaux IV, a full-scale replica of the entire cave designed by the architects Snøhetta, opened in December 2016 on the same hill above Montignac as part of the International Centre for Parietal Art. The original cave remains closed to the public, who visit the replicas instead.