![]() ![]() Worse yet, most people only see cave paintings in cropped photographs that are evenly lit with lights that are strong and white. “Today, when you light the whole cave, it is very stupid because you kill the staging,” says Jean-Michel Geneste, Lascaux’s curator, the director of France’s National Center of Prehistory, and the head of the archaeological project I worked on that summer. ![]() But now in Lascaux and other caves across the region, that’s changing.Īrtists at Lascaux used fire to see inside caves, but the glow and flicker of flames may also have been integral to the stories the paintings told. In general, archeologists have paid considerably less attention to how the use of fire for light affected the development of our species, compared to the use of fire for warmth and cooking. At the time, archeologists did not consider how the brightness and the location of lights altered how the paintings would have been viewed. Unfortunately, no one recorded where the lamps had been placed in the cave. When Lascaux cave was discovered in 1940, more than 100 small stone lamps that once burned grease from rendered animal fat were found throughout its chambers. I stood in silence as I tried to decode the work of the ancient people who had come here to express something of their world. Radiocarbon dates from Lascaux cave suggest the art is from that period, a time when wooly mammoths still roamed across Europe and people survived by hunting them and other large game. It was the summer of 1995, and in the dim glow, I gazed at the ghostly parade just as my ancestors did roughly 21,000 years ago. In front of that was a very large bison head that was completely out of scale with respect to the other images. The bison followed several horses painted solid black like silhouettes above them was an earthy-red horse with a black head and mane. The closest image resembled a bison, with elongated horns and U-shaped markings on its side. Where the limestone wall arched into the ceiling was a line of paintings and drawings of animals running deeper into the cave. Once my eyes adjusted to the faint light at the foot of the stairs, I saw that I was standing in the open chamber of a cave. Stone steps descended into the ground, and I walked down them slowly as if I were entering a dark movie theater, careful not to stumble and disrupt the silence.
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