Excuse the lack of posts but I’ve been on holiday. Although we had a good time, it didn’t half rain. We were in the Dordogne region in France and luckily for us there’s quite a bit of sightseeing to do. We ended up going to see a couple of prehistoric caves. Lascaux was one of them, well Lascaux II actually, the replica they built to preserve the original that was being damaged by all the visitors. Read about it here.
Lascaux is a very important cave as it’s covered in prehistoric cave paintings. It was only found by chance when a tree blew over to expose a hole and a dog got stuck down it in 1940. It is now know as the sistene chapel of cave paintings.
It was fascinating to see all the drawings, some quite naive, others more sophisticated. They don’t know why there were painted. You go there and try and work it out but I guess no one will ever know. The peculiar thing is horses, bulls, stags, cats, a bird, a bear, a human, a rhino were all painted but never a reindeer, and they were apparently eating reindeer 16,000 years ago when it was painted so it’s odd that they left them out.
There are also a lot of curious geometric symbols interspersed with the animals.
