"I step inside the cave. I have no lamp, no flashlight. And there are the paintings, steeped in this darkest of nights that has gone on for 20,000 years."

Like long since vanished stars whose brilliance we can still detect through the lens of a telescope, the animals of Chauvet-Pont-d'Arc are still running, jostling each other on the cave's walls. Cave lions, woolly rhinos, mammoths, cave bears – none of these sublime creatures survived the end of the last ice age. Equipped for the cold, these princes of steppe and savannah left ten thousand years ago to end their lives on the frozen Siberian plain. From Chauvet, they give us one last bow as those they once ruled looked on – those who, through one of nature's inscrutable schemes, were already destined to survive them.