Over the first half of the 20th century, the Catholic priest and prehistorian Henri Breuil transformed our understanding of early humans. Armed with a pared-down travel kit and a folding umbrella, this diminutive figure in a worn cassock criss-crossed France, then Europe, then the world, in search of painted caves. Having wriggled his way into hundreds of them, he re-emerged bearing his own renditions of the art with which our Stone Age ancestors decorated their interiors.
Nicknamed the Pope of Prehistory, the bright-eyed, sharp-tongued, chain-smoking Breuil was the first to systematically document Palaeolithic cave art: the scenes involving bison, horses and aurochs, tens of thousands of years old, that still take our breath away today. His thinking on the meaning of this ancient art, which he saw as linked to rituals for ensuring the success of the hunt, has since fallen out of favour, but more than any other individual he persuaded the world that humankind’s most distant ancestors were capable of symbolic thought and that they believed in other worlds.
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