Great Hall of the Bulls

Deep in a cave in the Dordogne region of France, herds of aurochs - the wild ancestors of cattle - along with horses and deer surge across the curving limestone walls, one bull stretching more than five meters from horn to tail. Ice Age painters worked here by lamplight some seventeen thousand years ago, blowing and brushing ochre and charcoal over the rock and letting its natural swells stand in for a flank. Among the oldest known art on earth, the images already command movement and form. Discovered by four boys in 1940, the cave was sealed in 1963 to save the fragile pigments; visitors now tour an exact replica nearby.