French artists finish replica of 'magical' cave paintings

A true-to-life replica of renowned Stone Age cave paintings have been replicated in three years by a group of artists as part of a projectAn army of artisans have laid down their paintbrushes, chisels and pigments after three years of painstaking work to create a true-to-life replica of renowned Stone Age cave paintings long hidden away in southwestern France.

"Absolutely all the work you see on the wall has been engraved, worked and sculpted, chiseled by hand, with little paintbrushes and sometimes even tools used in dentistry," said Francis Ringenbach, the artistic director of the project to replicate the 18,000-year-old Lascaux cave paintings.

The meticulously faithful copy of what has been dubbed the "Sistine Chapel of prehistoric art" is now ready to be transported one segment at a time -- 46 all together -- and installed just down the road from the original at a site semi-buried in a hillside in Montignac, in the Dordogne region.

Designed by Norwegian architectural firm Snohetta, the 150-meter-long and 9-meter-high International Center of Parital (rock wall) Art will open by the end of the year.

The nearly 2,000 Upper Paleolithic wall paintings depicting rhinos, horses, bison, deer and panthers make up Europe's most important collection of prehistoric art and were inscribed on UNESCO's World Heritage list in 1979.

Discovered in 1940 

The caves, discovered in 1940 by four teenagers, quickly became a massive tourist draw, with around a million people flocking to see the work of the oldest known modern humans, who came to Europe from Africa via Asia.

Authorities closed the caves to the public in 1963 out of concern over the danger posed by humans to the delicate micro-climate.

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