Deep beneath a remote mountainside, explorers breached a cave entrance that had remained sealed for 35,000 years, and the first thing they found defied every expectation. The ancient stone chamber was perfectly preserved, untouched by human hands since the last Ice Age.
In December 1994, three French cave explorers followed a faint current of air through a narrow opening in a limestone cliff above the Ardèche River in southern France. The gap, nicknamed “Papa’s Hole” after a colleague who had noticed it months earlier, had been considered too small and uninviting for most explorers to bother crossing.Jean-Marie Chauvet, Éliette Brunel, and Christian Hillaire deci…