PPT Slide
THE FIRST HUMAN CREATIONS
The caves at Lascaux in France were discovered accidentally in 1940. The paintings in those
caves are regarded as the most outstanding of all known prehistoric art.
___The Lascaux caverns had served as subterranean water channels, a few hundred to some 4,000
feet long. Far inside these caverns the hunter-artists engraved and painted on the walls pictures of
animals such as mammoth, bison, reindeer, horse. For light, they used tiny stone lamps filled with
marrow or fat, with a wick, perhaps, of moss. For drawing, they used chunks of red and yellow
ocher; for painting, they ground these same ochers into powders that they blew onto the walls or
mixed with some medium, such as animal fat, before applying. A large flat bone served as a palette;
they could make brushes from reeds or bristles; they could use a blowpipe of reeds to trace outlines
of figures and to put pigments on out-of-reach surfaces; and they had stone scrapers for smoothing
the wall and sharp flint points for engraving. [Source: Horst de la Croix et al. eds Gardner's Art
through the Ages, 9th ed. (Fort Worth: HBJ, 1991, pp. 28-29]