The Prehistoric Caves at Lascaux, France, Life Magazine
“The story is so improbable, so marvelous, that it feels more like the remnant of a dream, or a half-remembered myth, rather than something that unfolded within living memory… .
September 12, 1940. A warm afternoon in southwestern France. As two schoolboys hunt rabbits on a ridge covered with pine, oak and blackberry brambles, their dog, Robot, excitedly chases a hare down a hole in the ground beside a downed tree. As boys will, the youngsters begin to dig, widening the hole, removing rocks — until they find themselves not merely in another world, but another time.
In the cool dark beneath the known world, the boys discover “a Versailles of prehistory” — a vast series of caves, today collectively known as Lascaux, covered with wall paintings roughly 17,000 years old. In 1947, LIFE magazine’s Ralph Morse went to Lascaux, becoming the first professional photographer to document the breathtaking scenes. Still vibrant himself at 96, Morse shared his memories of that time and place with LIFE.com, recalling what it was like to encounter the strikingly lifelike, gorgeous handiwork of a long-vanished people: the Cro-Magnon.
“LIFE re-opened its Paris bureau after the second World War ended, in the same offices we rented before the war” Morse said. “One day we get a message from New York about some cave that people have been talking about. We do a little research, and find out that even though the cave was discovered a few years before, no one’s ever photographed the paintings. We know that the first thing we need is a generator to power our lights, but getting a generator anywhereafter the war was almost impossible. We had to have people in London ship one over. Once it arrived, we were ready to go.
“The first sight of those paintings was simply unbelievable,” Morse said. “I was amazed at how the colors held up after thousands of years — like they were painted the day before. Most people don’t realize how huge some of the paintings are. There are pictures of animals there that are ten, fifteen feet long, and more.”
“But it wasn’t a comfortable assignment,” Morse remembers. “It wasn’t a refined setting. It was a dungarees-and-sweatshirt job. When we first went down, there were no steps. You slid down on your rear end on on a piece of wood or the bare earth.”
The Cro-Magnon (from the French, “Abri de Crô-Magnon,” after a cave where remains were first found in 1868) were evidently far from the cartoonish, savage brutes of popular myth. In fact, over the past 150 years, scientists and artists alike have developed a complex, nuanced view of these early modern humans. In his most beautiful book, The Colossus of Maroussi (1941), the writer Henry Miller asserted: “I believe that Cro-Magnon settled here [in the Dordogne region] because he was extremely intelligent and had a highly developed sense of beauty.”
Miller, who was also an accomplished painter, went on: ’I believe that in Cro-Magnons the religious sense was already highly developed and that it flourished here even if he lived like an animal in the depths of caves.”
Read more: Lascaux: Early Color Photos of the Famous Cave Paintings, France 1947 | LIFE.com http://life.time.com/culture/lascaux-early-color-photos-of-the-famous-cave-paintings-france-1947/#ixzz2mHvzRu6D
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