The story of this place
On 18 December 1994, three cavers led by Jean-Marie Chauvet broke into a sealed cavern in the Ardèche gorges and found themselves face to face with the oldest figurative art known to humanity: hundreds of paintings roughly 36,000 years old, twice the age of Lascaux. Ice Age artists depicted lions on the hunt, woolly rhinoceroses, mammoths, cave bears and galloping horses with astonishing sophistication—shading, perspective and even a sense of movement. A rockfall had sealed the cave some 21,000 years ago, preserving it and the footprints of a child and a wolf. To protect the fragile original, an exact full-scale replica, Chauvet 2, opened to visitors in 2015.