Old Stone Age · 40,000-15,000 years ago

Ice Age cave art: Lascaux, Altamira and Sulawesi

Horses, bison, lions and hand stencils glow on cave walls in France, Spain and Indonesia. Students find the painted caves on the map, learn how Ice Age artists worked, and debate why people painted in the dark.

Teach it live New Open on the map
Length
45 minutes
Ages
10–13
On the map
3 steps, 15000 BC
Live lesson
7 rounds, 3 on the map
Worksheet
Two A4 pages, with Classroom
You need
A projector; phones for live

Live lesson · new in Classroom

Teach it live. The class answers on their phones.

Put the board on the projector. Students join with a six-digit code, no account needed, and tap the map: where was the frontier, where did the grain come from. Their pins drop in together when you reveal, and the closest student takes the round.

€19 per month: every lesson live, every worksheet, cancel anytime. Rome at its height runs live for free.

A live lesson on the projector: the class's pins on the map around Alexandria, the closest students listed beside it A student's phone: the question and a map to tap
7 rounds
3 places to find on the map, quiz questions, a class vote and a one-line answer.
About 15 minutes
Run it as the map step, or to open the discussion. You move on with the space bar.
A report
Every answer, per student and per round, to read back or print after the lesson.
1

Introduction

5 min

Read aloud

Horses, bison, lions and hand stencils glow on cave walls in France, Spain and Indonesia. Students find the painted caves on the map, learn how Ice Age artists worked, and debate why people painted in the dark.

By the end of the lesson, students can

  • Locate Lascaux, Chauvet, Altamira and the Maros caves on Sulawesi.
  • Describe how Ice Age artists made paint and pictures, including hand stencils.
  • Compare at least two explanations for why people made cave art.
2

Explore the map

12 min

Project the map, or let students follow on their own devices. Each step opens the map at the right year and place.

a

15000 BC

Valley of painted caves

Open the map in 15,000 BC and zoom in on the Vézère valley in southwest France, where Lascaux lies. Turn on Ice Age Seas: how far away was the Atlantic coast then?

Open this view on the map
b

15000 BC

Lions on the wall

Move east to the Ardèche gorge near the Rhône. In Chauvet Cave people painted lions, rhinos and mammoths more than 30,000 years ago. Which of these animals no longer live in Europe?

Open this view on the map
c

15000 BC

Art on the other side

Travel to the island of Sulawesi. Some cave paintings here are about 40,000 years old or more. With Ice Age Seas on, is the island joined to Sundaland, even when the sea is lowest?

Open this view on the map
3

Class discussion

14 min

Pick two or three. They run from what happened to why it mattered.

  1. Why do you think people painted animals deep inside dark caves, far from daylight?
  2. Experts first dismissed Altamira as a fake. Why might scholars around 1880 have refused to believe it?
  3. Lascaux was closed to visitors in 1963 because they were damaging the paintings. Was that the right choice?
  4. Cave art appears in Europe and in Indonesia at about the same time. What could that tell us about early humans?
  5. What can a painting tell a historian that a stone tool cannot?
4

Game round

9 min

No Rule History ruler lived in the Ice Age. Play one round as Ramesses II, who covered temple walls with pictures of his own deeds, and compare: why did he make images, and why might Ice Age painters have made theirs?

Open Rule History
5

Worksheet

5 min

This worksheet comes with Classroom

€19 per month unlocks every worksheet, every live lesson and the class workspace. The free lesson prints without a subscription.