Chauvet Cave
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How it came to be
Chauvet Cave lies in a limestone cliff above the former bed of the river Ardèche, near Vallon-Pont-d'Arc in southern France. On 18 December 1994 three cavers, Jean-Marie Chauvet, Eliette Brunel-Deschamps and Christian Hillaire, explored its depths, and the cave was named after Chauvet. A rock fall had sealed its entrance long ago, and it stayed closed until its discovery.
UNESCO counts more than 1,000 images on the walls, among them mammoths, bears, cave lions, rhinoceroses, bison and aurochs, and 4,000 inventoried remains of prehistoric animals were found on the floor. It dates the earliest drawings to the Aurignacian period, 32,000 to 30,000 years ago. The dating has been disputed, but a study published in 2012 supported the same range.
At Altamira and Lascaux, large numbers of visitors had led to mould growing on the walls and damaging the art. For that reason Chauvet has been closed to the public since 1994. It was inscribed as a World Heritage site in 2014, and on 25 April 2015 a full-size replica, the Caverne du Pont-d'Arc, opened in a building a few kilometres from the real cave.
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