lascaux cave paintings

On September 12, 1940, four teenagers and a dog stumbled upon a series of caves with nearly 2,000 different prehistoric drawings near the village of Montignac, in the department of Dordogne.

The artwork is approximately 17,300 years old, and feature extinct animals, human figures and abstract symbols.

The Lascaux Caves were added to the UNESCO World Heritage Site list in 1979. The caves were initially open to the public, but mold and damage from human exhalation and traffic threatened the paintings, so now only science nerds can look at the ancient art.

Benh Zeitlin, the co-writer and director of Beasts of the Southern Wild, was inspired by the renderings of aurochs in the Lascaux Caves.

One of the rooms in the caves, called the Great Hall of the Bulls, is dominated by four giant depictions of aurochs (the wild ancestor to cattle). One of the auroch drawings is 17 ft (5.2 m) long- the largest animal discovered so far in cave art.

Miss Bathsheba's tattoo...