Fabulous prehistoric time conservatory, the Cave Chauvet belongs to the patrimony of the humanity : virgin of all external violation since 20 or 30 000 years, it offers to many seekers discipline, today and tomorrow, an exceptional study field where conjugate natural phenomena, traces of the animal and human life, religious and artistic preoccupation testimonies of our ancestors.
To the moment where paints of the cave Chauvet were realized, the Ardeche offered a landscape of Toundra where prospered a cold fauna dominated by the aurochs, the mammoth, the woolly rhinoceros, the polar fox and the bear of caverns.
The cave presents as a vast underground system, long of near 500 m, where galleries can reach 30 m large for 10 m of height. From prehistoric times, doubles it natural entry has been clogged by debris. Today, the alone means of access to the cave is a narrow passage.
| The circus of Estre constitutes a preferential investigation terrain for the speleologist and the archaeologist: this remarkable natural site, situated to the end of seasonal courses borrowed by the great mammals, was all indicated to shelter the underground sanctuary of a nomadic hunter people . |
 | Ornate caves situate for the essential in Western Europe, but one finds some equally in Australia, South Africa, Brazil. These caves translate the cultural company unit of hunters evolving in difficult climatical conditions. |
 | One counts in the cave more of 300 represented animals, belonging to 13 different species whose some ever or very rarely observed: owl, hyenas, panthères... Figurations are distributed all along the cavity: representations to the red ochre, rather isolated, in the first part (rhinoceros, bear, panthères...), great black paint compositions organized in panels in halls of the bottom, where succeed aurochs and bisons, reindeers, bear, horses and feline. |
 | Bones of bear have sometimes been manipulated by men in the course of times. It seems that the Man of Cromagnon has venerated this animal. To the prehistory, the cave has had to serve as shelter to bear of caverns: one can today see there bones of animal hundred, similarly that traces of their displacement, intermingled to marks left by men, notably at the painted wall foot or engraved. |
This graph allows to visualize the age of paints of the cave CHAUVET (30 000 years) by report to the other caves. It reveals that the Cave CHAUVET is the most old ornate cave of the world and without doubting the most beautiful.