Pech Merle cave

Interesting facts

A 2011 ancient-DNA study found the gene for leopard spotting in Ice Age horses, suggesting the spotted horses were drawn from life, though later work disputed this.

Radiocarbon dating of charcoal from the right-hand spotted horse gave an age of about 24,600 years before present.

Besides the two horses, the spotted-horse panel holds a red fish, six black hand stencils, seven red thumbprints and 252 painted dots.

In 1990 Michel Lorblanchet recreated the horse panel in the Bugadous cave at Reilhac, chewing charcoal and ochre with saliva and spitting it at the wall.

The black paint of the horses contains manganese and barium oxides, which Lorblanchet left out of his reconstruction because they are toxic.

Of the roughly 700 motifs in the cave, 543 are simple red or black dots, blown onto the rock or dabbed on with fingertips.

In 2013 expert San trackers from the Kalahari examined the prehistoric footprints in the cave as part of the Tracking in Caves project.

The first chamber, called the Red Room for its reddish formations, was found in 1915 by a Paris medical student, Henri Redon.

Thirteen-year-old Marthe David was with her brother André and Henri Dutertre when the painted chambers were reached in September 1922.

A rockfall sealed the natural entrance at the end of the last glaciation, and visitors still enter through an artificial tunnel dug in 1923.

Why it is worth it

Pech Merle is one of the very few great painted caves of the Ice Age in France that can still be entered, and the art inside is startlingly direct: a black frieze of mammoths and bison, two spotted horses set back to back, stencilled hands, and the footprints of a teenager preserved in the floor of a dried-out pool. The cave opens into a hill above the valleys of the Sagne and the Célé, near the village of Cabrerets in the Quercy; "pech" means hill in Occitan.

The galleries were carved by an underground river roughly two million years ago and run on two levels for close to two kilometres, of which about 1,200 metres can be visited. The walls carry around 700 painted or engraved motifs, including 25 mammoths, 13 bison, 9 horses, aurochs, deer, a cave bear, a feline and several imaginary animals, along with human figures and hundreds of abstract signs. The panel of the spotted horses, on a rock face 3.6 metres long whose right edge itself resembles a horse's head, is around 25,000 years old and belongs to the earliest phase of painting here, in the Gravettian period. Archaeologist Michel Lorblanchet, who studied the panel, showed through experiment that the pigment was probably spat onto the rock. The so-called Black Frieze, also known as the Chapel of the Mammoths, is a single spiralling composition of mammoths, bison, horses and aurochs, while on another ceiling finger-traced lines in the clay outline mammoths and female figures over some 40 square metres. Claw marks and hollows left by cave bears are still visible.

Local tradition holds that a priest who refused the revolutionary oath hid in the cave during the French Revolution and was fed by his parishioners. The decorated galleries were reached in April 1922 by two teenagers, André David and Henri Dutertre, who dug through a clay-choked passage; they had been exploring the cave for two years with encouragement from the parish priest, Amédée Lemozi, an amateur prehistorian who made the first study of the paintings. The owners of the château of Cabrerets then funded an access tunnel and a road, and the cave has been open to the public since the 1920s. A further network, the Combel, was found in 1949. A museum of prehistory named after Lemozi stands at the site.

Getting there

Pech Merle is at Cabrerets in the Lot, about 18 km in a straight line from Cahors, the nearest city, and around 32 km by road. The nearest airport is Brive–Vallée de la Dordogne Airport (BVE), about 60 km away.

From the encyclopaedia

Pech Merle is a French hillside cave at Cabrerets, in the Lot département of the Occitania region, about 32 kilometres east of Cahors, by road. It is one of the few prehistoric cave painting sites in France that remains open to the general public, albeit with an entry fee. Encompassing two levels and spanning over 2 km (1.24 mi) in area—of which only 1,200 m (3,900 ft) are open to the public—are caverns, wells and sloping tunnels, the walls of which are painted with dramatic, prehistoric murals dating from the Gravettian culture. But some of the paintings and engravings may date from the later Magdalenian era.

Wikipedia · CC BY-SA 4.0

Pech Merle cave

Interesting facts

Why it is worth it

Getting there

Plan your visit

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From the encyclopaedia