When the first radiocarbon results from Chauvet were published, they placed the oldest paintings at around thirty-six thousand years, and a number of specialists did not believe them.
The objection was not obscurantism. The prevailing scheme of Palaeolithic art assumed a broad development from simple to sophisticated, and the Chauvet images are sophisticated: walls scraped back to a pale ground so the figures stand out, outlines incised so they catch a shadow in moving light, shading stumped with the hand, perspective in overlapping horns, and animals grouped so that they read as a sequence of movement, a pride of lions in pursuit, rhinoceroses with horns engaged. Work of that quality sitting at the very beginning of the record was a genuine anomaly, and the reasonable first hypothesis was contamination of the dated samples or dating of charcoal that had been carried into the cave later.
The argument was settled by dating something other than the art. A synthesis published in 2016 drew on more than 250 dates across the cave and, decisively, dated the rockfalls that sealed the entrance. The cliff above the opening collapsed in phases, and the last of them closed the cave long before anyone could have entered to paint at a later period. The chronology of the seal constrains the chronology of the art from outside, independently of any question about the charcoal.
The result removed the developmental assumption. Fully accomplished figurative art is present at the start of the European record, which means it does not have a European origin story of gradual improvement.
The cave preserves more than the paintings, because the seal held. Cave bear bones and hibernation hollows lie on the floor where the animals left them, along with bear claw marks and, in places, human footprints. A bear skull sits on a fallen block near the centre of one chamber. That last detail is the kind of find that invites a ritual reading and does not compel one; it may have been placed, and the deposit around it does not settle the question.
Chauvet has never been opened to the public. That decision was taken explicitly in the light of Lascaux. Fewer than a hundred people enter in a year, in groups of a few, for a couple of hours, on metal walkways. A full-scale replica opened nearby in 2015 and receives the visitors instead.