Road Trip Day 4

          We spent the night in the town of Sarlat.

          In the morning, we went to the legendary Lascaux caves.  These are the caves containing the famous cave drawings that you've seen of bison and so on.  You can't go into the actual caves anymore (they've been closed since 1963 due to a white and green malady caused by the breath of the visitors) but there is a cave next door with an exact replica of the Lascaux cave drawings.  It was really worth it.

         The cave drawings were made by people who lived about 17,000 years ago.  We learned a lot.  For one thing, there are dozens of drawings in the cave.  The people who made the drawings did not actually live in the cave.  They just did their artwork there.  And they had scaffolds and oil lamps that they used to see what they were doing and make their drawings up high on the walls.  Like all good caves, this one was discovered by some boys and a dog in 1940.

         After lunch, we went to the National Prehistory Museum which was in another town about 20 minutes away.  They have all sorts of artifacts from ancient people who lived in this region from 35,000 to 15,000 years ago.  They say these people were smart and they hunted all sorts of great beasts that are now extinct.  They had art carvings and everything.  And, they didn't live IN caves.  The lived at the mouths of caves, because it was too dark and damp to live inside them.  This region is pockmarked with limestone caves so there were lots of ancient people here doing their thing long ago.

          
          Unfortunately I am in a bad internet place and the photos don't post too well to the blog as they take too much time to upload/unload/download/whateverload.  So we'll get you some more pics soon.