Chauvet Cave

The cave paintings and rock art of Chauvet

The Chauvet Cave is located near the Vallon-Pont-d'Arc in the Ardèche region of southern France. The Cave Paintings of Chauvet date to 30,000 to 32,000 years ago. In the Chauvet Cave hundreds of animal paintings have been found making Chauvet Cave one of the world's most important rock art sites.

Chauvet Cave Through the Eyes of a Sculptor

Visit to the Chauvet Cave in 1999 by John Robinson

Quote from Jacob Bronowski’s famous book: “The Ascent of Man”

“Man is a puny, slow, awkward, unarmed animal - he had to invent the pebble, a flint, a knife, a spear.

		But why to these scientific inventions, which were essential to his survival, did he come to caves like this, and make paintings of animals in places that were dark, secret, remote, hidden, inaccessible? I think that the power that we see expressed here for the first time is the power of anticipation: the forward-looking imagination. Art and science are both uniquely human actions, outside the range of anything that animal can do. And here we see that they derive from the same human faculty: the ability to visualise the future, to foresee what might happen and plan to anticipate it, and represent it to ourselves in images that we project and move inside our head.

What we call cultural evolution is essentially a constant growing and widening of the human imagination”.

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