In September 1940, four teenagers and a dog slid down a dark shaft in the French countryside expecting a tunnel to a ruined manor. Instead they found themselves standing inside a 20,000-year-old art gallery, surrounded by massive animals seemingly stampeding across the limestone ceiling.

This episode explores the Lascaux Cave, a stunning testament to prehistoric genius and a tragic lesson in loving a masterpiece too much. We unpack the sophisticated techniques behind over 6,000 figures, the competing theories about their meaning, and how modern curiosity unleashed a biological disaster that locked the cave away forever. It is a story about imagination, preservation, and what survives us.

• The prehistoric airbrush technique of blowing mineral pigment through hollow bones
• The crossed bison panel that achieved 3D perspective thousands of years before the Renaissance
• Picasso’s reaction after visiting: “We have learned nothing in 12,000 years”
• How 1,200 daily visitors exhaling CO2 triggered mold and dissolved the ancient pigments
• The discovery of a brand-new fungus species and the millimeter-exact replica, Lascaux IV