You see the interface of reality and illusion,' said our Font de Gaume guide, Jean-Pierre Vanzo, as he used a flickering flashlight to show us how they worked by tiny oil lamps. 'They were just on the frontier of mastering space. In that same cave, the only one with polychrome paintings that is still open to visitors, you see a famous group of colorful bison painted using the convex and concave lines of the stone. At France's Font de Gaume cave, you see a famous deer licking another. Their creatures show motion, and – in places – even emotion. Often, the artists used the natural lines of the stone to create bellies or necks or striding legs of beasts. This is art, not scribblings or graffiti. There, as in nearly all the caves, there is a huge date range, over many millennia, even within one cave. And in a very famous cave nearby, El Castillo, the oldest was made 40,800 years ago. In Hornos de la Pena, for instance, the oldest animal paintings were made 18,000 years ago (more than three times older than Stonehenge). Or the windy plain at Stonehenge, trying to imagine how and why Megalithic men raised those boulders 5,500 years ago.īut trying to put yourself in the same place as the Cro-Magnon cave artists of the Upper Paleolithic period (50,000-15,000 years ago) is a leap through time and space far beyond. Or walked on the Great Wall of China, about 2,200 years old. You may have stood in the Colosseum, trying to conjure the Romans who hauled the stones and fought the lions there, 2,000 years ago. Several tour organizations offer expeditions that cover caves in France and/or Spain touring them by yourself, enjoying the beautiful regions while visiting some of the caves, is also possible, with advance ticketing (see details below).įor travelers seeking to experience the ancient world, there's nothing else like it on Earth – not even close.

There are another 15 caves in southwestern France, just across the Pyrenees. 'Can you feel it?'įeeling what those Ice Age men (and maybe women), our close relatives, felt is the haunting fun of a trip to the prehistoric cave areas of Cantabrian Spain, where Hornos de la Pena is among 18 art-filled caverns.

'In total darkness, these artists journeyed to Mother Earth,' he nearly whispered. Cantabrian caves scholar Daniel Garrido switched off his lantern. View Gallery: Cave paintings offer evocative link to human historyĭeep in a tall and narrow cave at the top of a rocky hill in remote northern Spain, we crept, bent over, in the very space where shamans painted delicate images of cave bison and mammoths on limestone 1,500 generations ago, to invoke the animal spirits for our Ice Age ancestors.

Cro magnon man