Located in southern France, the Cave of Pont d’Arc holds the earliest-known and best-preserved figurative drawings, dating back to the Aurignacian period (30,000–32,000 BP). PHOTO: Nat Geo

The Cave of Chauvet-Pont-d’Arc has been ferociously protected by the French Ministry of Culture. An exceptional testimony of prehistoric art, the cave was closed off by a rock fall and remained sealed until its discovery in 1994. The images demonstrate techniques of shading, combinations of paint and engraving, three-dimensionality and movement.

Around 36,000 years ago, someone living in a time incomprehensibly different from ours began to draw on its bare walls: profiles of cave lions, herds of rhinos and mammoths, a magnificent bison off to the right, and a chimeric creature—part bison, part woman—conjured from an enormous cone of overhanging rock. Other chambers harbor horses, ibex, and aurochs; an owl shaped out of mud by a single finger on a rock wall; an immense bison formed from ocher-soaked handprints; and cave bears walking casually, as if in search of a spot for a long winter’s nap. The works are often drawn with nothing more than a single and perfect continuous line. In all, the artists depicted 442 animals over perhaps thousands of years, using nearly 400,000 square feet of cave surface as their canvas.

National Geographic Magazine explores:

Hidden by a rock slide for 22,000 years, the cave came to light in December 1994, when three spelunkers named Eliette Brunel, Christian Hillaire, and Jean-Marie Chauvet scrambled through a narrow crevice in a cliff and dropped into the dark entry.

The age of these drawings makes youngsters of Egypt’s storied pyramids, yet every charcoal stroke, every splash of ocher looks as fresh as yesterday. Their beauty whipsaws your sense of time. One moment you are anchored in the present, observing coolly. The next you are seeing the paintings as if all other art—all civilization—has yet to exist.

How did such human accomplishment come to be, so long ago, seemingly out of nowhere? Until recently it was thought that the drawings found on the walls of well-known Upper Paleolithic caves in southern Europe like Altamira, Lascaux, and Chauvet were the expression of a superior kind of human—us—who had arrived on the continent, driving out the brutish, artless Neanderthals who had been living and evolving there for hundreds of thousands of years.

It turns out that the story is a good deal more complicated, and more interesting. It begins, as stories often do, in Africa.

Read more.