~ Old-Timey Critter Update ~

...from The Writer's Almanac...

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It was on this day in 1940 that four teenage boys discovered the Lascaux cave paintings, generally agreed to be the greatest works of prehistoric art ever found. The boys were looking for fabled buried treasure in the woods, and they stumbled upon a cavern, about 65 feet wide and 15 feet tall. When the boys held up their lanterns, they saw that the walls of the cave were covered with paintings of animals.It turned out that the cave paintings were about 17,000 years old.

Anthropologists believe that the cave was used as a kind of church, devoted to the worship of animals.There are more than 200 paintings and 1,500 engravings in the Lascaux cave, almost all of them animals, including bulls, deer, oxen, herds of horses, stags, and cats, painted in various shades of yellow, red, brown, and black, realistic drawings with beautiful, fluid lines, showing the various creatures turning their heads, walking through water, falling off cliffs.One of the few traces left behind by the artists are their own handprints, which they made by tracing around their own fingers.