Many hands painted Lascaux caves

Times of London ^ | July 29, 2008 | Norman Hammond

[SunkenCiv]

The painted caves of Lascaux in the Dordogne region of France are one of the most famed monuments of Ice Age art. Dating back about 17,000 years, the great Hall of the Bulls and its adjacent chambers proved so popular with visitors that a generation ago the cave had to be closed to save the paintings from encroaching mould. A replica, Lascaux II, was built nearby and has proved equally popular.

One thing that strikes the visitor is the exuberance of the compositions, with hundreds of animals, including bison, horses and deer, parading along the walls and ceilings, often overlapping. A big problem in sorting out possible groupings of animals, and possible motives for painting them, has been the issue of contemporaneity -- what was painted when?

...the presence of the antler, which seems from its scarcity in the paint samples to have been from a single short period of activity about 17,000 years ago, can be used an an indicator of a group of paintings that were created contemporaneously, and is thus "a tracer of a specific ornamentation phase of the cave", the team concludes. Similar discovery of unusual extraneous materials in other cave pigments might then enable different episodes in the creation of Lascaux's rich inventory of art to be teased out.

[Joe 6-pack]

Under deep consideration, and as self-appointed spokesperson for all Slavic peoples, I'm perfectly willing to forego reparations across the board, and instead, in recognition of the deep pain and insult of the misuse of our ethno-linguistic identity, I'd be willing to settle for a small royalty of say, $5.00 every time a person of African descent utilizes the words, "slave," "slavery," "slave trade," etc.

I think it's only fair.