THE discovery during the War of prehistoric paintings in the Lascaux Caves near Montignac in south-western France is of the highest interest. A large pine tree had blown down, and some French boys wandering with their dog in the vicinity found under its roots the entrance to a hitherto unknown cave. On the walls were innumerable paintings, many of them of large size, which were soon recognized as being palæolithic. Lascaux, though some distance from the well-known cave sites near LesEyzies, is after all not so far away from them, and local folk knew by hearsay all about such places as Font de Gaume, Combarelles, etc. But the new paintings (there are also some engravings), while similar in style to some of the paintings at these other sites, are for the most part different. Indeed, the importance of the new discovery is that it vastly increases our knowledge of the earlier styles, of which elsewhere we have so far only known a little. The Lascaux pictures are mainly of Aurignacian age, antedating the wonderful polychromes found at Altamira in northern Spain and Font de Gaume in the Dordogne, and throw a new light on the evolution of this Phase I of the cave art which is now likely to become a great deal clearer. Many of the figures are very large and include drawings of bulls, horses, stags, bison and rhinoceros. In one or two instances the animals are painted with their tongues out-reminding one of certain paintings of the eastern Spanish rock-shelter art, as also does the way in which some of the Lascaux animal horns are depicted. These two circumstances back up the contention that a part at any rate of the eastern Spanish art is palaeolithic in date. Altamira is the site where the finest Magdalenian paintings have been preserved. Lascaux can claim the same title in respect to the earlier Aurignacian art.