The Travels of Nonette and Jerry Robinson: PREHISTORIC CAVEMAN DAY

Today we visited Lascaux and La Roque Saint Christophe, in France. Lascaux is a cave that has 15,000 year old paintings of the animals from that time that prehistoric man hunted. The paintings are beautiful and show that man 15,000 years ago was artistic, almost beyond belief. The cave was originally discovered in 1940 by a teenager out walking his dog. After the war the caves were opened to the public. It became evident that the painting were deteriorating so in 1963 they were closed. The place we visited today was built in 2016 and is an exact copy of the cave drawings. It took artists 7 years to produce the copies. The animals are mostly large extinct cows, horses, and stags. One of the bulls is a painting 17 feet long. Pablo Picasso said that the 15,000 year old art was as good as modern art. Next we visited La Roque Saint Christophe which is a cliff dwelling that was occupied for 25,000 years by different groups of people. There is a natural covered ledge on a cliff that is almost a kilometer long. The ledge is 80 meters above the river valley below. The ledge offered protection from weather, predators, and bad guys. Different peoples lived there continuously for all those years until around 1600AD. Without rails, I bet a many a caveman lost his life falling from the ledge. They had barns and stables on the ledge to keep their animals in later years and a cave with bars for a jail. Here are some pictures from the day.

The walls and ceiling are calcite which is a white mineral and a great canvas for the Artist

These are the tools the artists used. #6 are straws though which the artist blew paint, from his or her mouth, onto the walls. The first spray painters. In addition to the paintings the artists engraved the walls with animals using #1 flint.

The only light they had in the caves was supplied by fat lamps like these. Filled with fat which they lit on fire, if they had a lot of these, they would have plenty of light.