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HTO · Public domain
Landmark Europe archaeological

Chauvet Cave

38,000 years ago

Contains the oldest known cave paintings in the world, with masterful depictions of lions, rhinos, and mammoths from 36,000 years ago

See the deep-time shelf

Wikipedia

The opening of the article, and a way into the rest of it without leaving the site.

Chauvet Cave on Wikipedia.

Read the article

38,000 years ago — older than the timeline's axis, which begins at 9000 BCE. Drawn to the same scale as the rest of the canvas, everything since would be a single pixel, so Chauvet Cave sits on the deep-time shelf instead.

Who held this ground

Borders from dated snapshots, up to a century apart; precision varies.

Reconstruction

  1. No border recorded here in this snapshot (3000 BCE)
  2. Beaker (2000 BCE) Border precision: Approximate
  3. Urnfield cultures (1500 BCE–700 BCE) Border precision: Approximate
  4. No border recorded here in this snapshot (500 BCE)
  5. Celtic Hallstatt culture (400 BCE) Border precision: Approximate
  6. No border recorded here in this snapshot (323 BCE–300 BCE)
  7. European tribal peoples (200 BCE) Border precision: Approximate
  8. Roman Republic (100 BCE) Border precision: Approximate
  9. Roman Empire (1 BCE–200 CE) Border precision: Approximate
  10. Rome (Constantius) (300 CE) Border precision: Approximate
  11. Western Roman Empire (400 CE) Border precision: Approximate
  12. Burgunds (500 CE) Border precision: Approximate
  13. Frankish Kingdom (600 CE–700 CE) Border precision: Approximate
  14. Carolingian Empire (800 CE–900 CE) Border precision: Approximate
  15. Kingdom of France (1000 CE–1200 CE) Border precision: Approximate
  16. France (1279 CE–2026 CE) Border precision: Approximate
Border precision
  • Approximate
Image credits 1 picture from Wikimedia Commons