The non-human animals are painted with almost supernatural attention to facial and muscular detail, but, no doubt to the disappointment of tourists, the humanoids painted on cave walls have no faces. There are human-like creatures, though, or what some archeologists cautiously call “humanoids”, referring to the bipedal stick figures that can sometimes be found on the margins of the panels containing animal shapes. Scholars of paleoarcheology infer that the paintings were made by our distant ancestors, although the caves contain no depictions of humans doing any kind of painting. Not all of these images appear in each of the decorated caves – some feature only handprints or megafauna. Uncannily, given the distances that separate them, all are adorned with similar decorations: handprints or stencils of human hands, abstract designs containing dots and crosshatched lines, and large animals, both carnivores and herbivores, most of them now extinct. They have been found on every continent except Antarctica – at least 350 of them in Europe alone, thanks to the cave-rich Pyrenees – with the most recent discoveries in Borneo (2018) and Croatia (April 2019). Today, almost a century later, we know that Lascaux is part of a global phenomenon, originally referred to as “decorated caves”. This was the famous and touristically magnetic Lascaux cave, which eventually had to be closed to visitors lest their exhalations spoil the artwork. “We were completely crazy,” yet another said, although the build-up of carbon dioxide in a poorly ventilated cave may have had something to do with that. Another recalled that the painted animals in the flickering light of the boys’ lamps seemed to be moving. One of the boys later reported that, stunned and elated, they began to dart around the cave like “a band of savages doing a war dance”. The hole led to a cave, the walls and ceilings of which were covered with brightly coloured paintings of animals unknown to the 20th-century Dordogne – bison, aurochs and lions. They found the dog and much more, especially on return visits illuminated with paraffin lamps. A quick search revealed that their animal companion had fallen into a hole in the ground, so – in the spirit of Tintin, with whom they were probably familiar – the boys made the perilous 15-metre descent to find it. As the story goes – and there are many versions of it – they had been taking a walk in the woods near the town of Montignac when the dog accompanying them suddenly disappeared. In 1940, four teenage boys stumbled, almost literally, from German-occupied France into the Paleolithic age.
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