Mulling over some of Europe’s earliest art

Time can be hard to fathom at times.

On our La Grande France tour with Albatross, we encounter a flurry of castles and palaces from the Middle Ages and Renaissance period.

Later in our trip, we will see an aqueduct and an amphitheatre constructed almost 2000 years ago, when the Roman Empire swept through Gaul, as France was then known.

All these landmarks inspire awe and feel ancient.

But compared to the treasures of Lascaux, they’re a relatively recent drop in the ocean of human ingenuity. Festooned with polychrome art from the palaeolithic era, the caves here, located on a hillside above the town of Montignac, are the most lauded of the UNESCO-protected caves found in the Vezere Valley of the Dordogne region of south-western France.

Their accidental discovery in 1940 — by a teenage lad and his mates looking for a dog that had hared off into the woods chasing a rabbit — changed the way historians, palaeo-archaeologists and anthropologists viewed the world and its inhabitants.

Prehistoric humans were actually more sophisticated than their “caveman” reputation had previously suggested.

Following the caves’ unveiling to the general public in 1948, over a million visitors flocked to mull over and marvel at the depictions of the animals their distant forebears — the Cro-Magnon people — would have ridden, hunted or avoided.

But since the caves’ closure in 1963, only a limited number of experts have been allowed in. The caves’ delicate environment and cultural significance were deemed too precious and fragile to risk further damage from human hordes and the associated fungi, bacteria and mould generated by their presence and gases.

Visitors can, however, walk through copies of the cave, including an exact replica 400m away at the foot of the same hill.

Taking around three and a half years to complete, Lascaux IV, as it’s known, was painted mural by mural and has the same temperature, humidity levels, scents and acoustics of the real cave.

Its home is the glass-and-concrete International Centre for Cave Art, unveiled in 2016 by the then French president, Francois Hollande. Promising 8500sqm of exploration, it’s staffed by knowledgeable, multilingual guides like Clement, who leads us on an absorbing tour 20,000 or so years into the past.

A cinematic screening sets the scene for what this part of France would have looked like then, near the end of the last ice age, when woolly megafauna roamed the tundra-like landscapes and winters were much longer and colder than today’s.

Before bringing us inside the replica cave, Clement tells us we won’t be allowed to take photographs. I can feel the collective gasp of disappointment. But with our camera-phones tucked inside our pockets, we are able to devote our full attention to the art on the walls and ceilings and listen to Clement’s informative and impassioned commentary.

As we walk through the dimly lit chambers (kept at a constant 13C), our guide points out — and shines his torch on — some of the 600 painted animals and symbols and 1500 other engravings and handprints etched here.

Charcoal and natural pigments were used to draw horses, deer, bison, ibex, wolves, bears and creatures that later went extinct in Europe, such as mammoths, lions and aurochs.

Incidentally, there are no portrayals of the reindeers that provided much of the food of the palaeolithic people, who didn’t, says Clement, actually live in caves. Being hunter-gatherers, they moved around where the food migrated, living in tents made from animal hides and seeking temporary shelter in caves when the need arose.

Mystery still shrouds their motivations for producing the cave art and Clement suggests it may have been for ritualistic, ceremonial or spiritual reasons.

Looking around, I have to keep reminding myself just how old these murals are (well, the original ones anyway).

Humankind had occupied the Vezere Valley for around 400,000 years, but these were done around 17,000 years ago. That’s many, many millennia before masons began crafting the great pyramids of Giza and Stonehenge.

In relative terms, it almost seems like yesterday that Michelangelo painted the frescoes of a certain 15th-century chapel at the Vatican (one of the Lascaux caves’ monikers, incidentally, is “The Sistine Chapel of the Dordogne”). After Clement’s tour, we’re ushered into an exhibition space where we can take photographs of replica murals and partake in immersive activities on electronic touchscreens and tablets.

It’s interesting, providing further insight into the treasures here, but for me the highlight of this visit was the part where technology took a back seat and we just looked and listened, entranced by the art of the distant past.