Every Then & Theory plate comes from a true story, and this card tells the one behind yours.

The Then & Theory team

Painting by firelight

A red mammoth fills a cave wall above a figure with a raised torch. The plate names no cave. In the Chauvet cave in southern France, sealed by a rockfall around 20,000 years ago and found in 1994, more than a thousand drawings survive, the oldest dated to over 30,000 years ago, among them a mammoth outlined in red. In 2021 archaeologists tested Ice Age lights in a cave in northern Spain. Their torches burned for 20 minutes to an hour, lit a few metres around them, smoked, and needed tending. Fat lamps gave a far weaker, steadier light with no smoke.

Sources

1. UNESCO World Heritage Centre, “Grotte Chauvet-Pont d’Arc”
2. French Ministry of Culture, Chauvet cave: “Red mammoth”
3. Medina-Alcaide et al., PLOS ONE (2021), lighting in Palaeolithic caves