Seventy-five years ago today,  September 12, 1940, eighteen-year-old apprentice mechanic Marcel Ravidat was exploring the caves near his home in Lascaux, France. The war was over in the “Free Zone” of Vichy France, and young Marcel went exploring a hole he had discovered a few days earlier, opened the prior winter as an oak tree had been uprooted by a storm.

What Marcel saw hadn’t been seen in over 15,000 years. He had stumbled upon the entrance of a cave containing some of the most spectacular cave paintings ever found. He and his friends kept the cave a secret until finally revealing its location to a teacher known to be a scholar of the other less spectacular paintings in the area. During the war, the cave was used by resistance fighters to store weapons. In 1948, the cave was opened to the public. But the breath of the constant stream of visitors, along with exposure to the atmosphere, began to take a toll. The cave was finally closed to the public in 1963.

All images here are from Wikipedia.

References

• Lascaux at French Ministry of Culture
  Lascaux at Wikipedia
• Marcel Ravidat obituary at New York Times

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