Written By: Daria Haner Edited By: Yosharelli S.
Imagine that you are wandering through a dense forest and, all of a sudden, stumble upon a hidden cave entrance. Your curiosity gets the better of you, and you step inside. The floor lies cloaked in layers of dust and clay, and as you lift up your lantern to get a better view, it reveals magnificent drawings on the walls—horses galloping, deer leaping, and bulls charging—that all seem to come to life in the flickering light. This is exactly what happened to four French teenagers in 1940 when they rediscovered the Cave of Lascaux in southwestern France.
These incredible pieces of art were made around 17,000 years ago by some of our early human ancestors, called Cro-Magnons. They were humans, just like us, and were some of the earliest people living in Europe. The artists who made the drawings in the cave used natural pigments as their “paint”—metal hematite to make red and charcoal to make black. We know that the artists were very skillful because of the way they used the caves contours to show movement, and used perspective to show how the animals they were drawing might have really looked when seeing them outside.
The paintings in the Lascaux cave show important animals in the lives of these early humans. Archaeologists think that they were animals that they hunted for food or saw in the forests around them. These include bison, deer, giant bulls, and wild horses. They also painted imaginary beings, like a horse with a single horn on its head and a human with a bird’s head. Such surreal details are what make researchers today think that this cave had a ritual purpose. It may have been a spot where people gathered to honor the animals or pray to them. Another theory is that they could have drawn them to preserve their own stories and spiritual beliefs, passing down knowledge to future generations through drawings.
The cave paintings are a reminder to us that humans have shown creativity and intelligence throughout history and prehistory. Even though the artists who made these paintings lived thousands of years before us, we are connected through our shared love of art. This art shows us that even in the distant past, humans have felt a need to create and capture beauty and leave their own mark on the world. The Lascaux Cave paintings still inspire us today, and they show us that creativity is a fundamental part of what it means to be human.
Visit the cave virtually: https://archeologie.culture.gouv.fr/lascaux/en/visit-cave
Vocabulary:
Cro-Magnons: a group of early modern humans living in Europe starting around 40,000 years ago.
Pigments: a substance that can be used to color other materials
Archaeologist: a scientist who studies the human past through objects and materials, often through excavating (digging)
Sources:
Cro Magnon cave paintings - Modern Human Origins. (2010, June 6). Modern Human Origins. https://www.modernhumanorigins.com/cro-magnon-cave-paintings
Groeneveld, E. (2016, September 6). Lascaux Cave. World History Encyclopedia. https://www.worldhistory.org/Lascaux_Cave/
Looney, M. (2006). Lascaux (article). Khan Academy. https://www.khanacademy.org/humanities/ap-art-history/global-prehistory-ap/paleolithic-mesolithic-neolithic-apah/a/lascaux
Tedesco, L. A. (2019). Lascaux (ca. 15,000 B.C.). Metmuseum.org. https://www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/lasc/hd_lasc.htm
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