Lascaux's Prehistoric Paintings Still Endangered by Fungus

Black Mold Patches Above the Cow's Horns
Photo, French Ministry of Culture

In my Wall Street Journal article a year and a half ago about the fungi and bacteria problems jeopardizing the prehistoric cave paintings at Lascaux, France, I quoted Jean-Michel Geneste, the cave's curator, asserting that everything was under control:

There is no damage to the paintings....Now the situation is stable. Now it [the growth of microorganisms] has disappeared naturally from the paintings.

To which I responded, in that June 13, 2006 article:

To put to rest the questions that continue to be raised...these reassurances urgently need to be publicly corroborated through visits by disinterested outsiders who are experts.

Now, according to the NY Times, there's been an "inspection by a team of microbiologists." And their findings are alarming.

Marlise Simons writes:

For the second time in a decade, fungus is threatening France's most celebrated prehistoric paintings, the mysterious animal images that line the Lascaux cave in the Dordogne region of southwestern France, scientists say.

No consensus has emerged among experts over whether the invading patches of gray and black mold are the result of climate change, a defective temperature-control system, the light used by researchers or the carbon dioxide exhaled by visitors....The government has approved a new treatment of the blemishes with a fungicide and ordered that the cave be sealed off for as long as four months so that its delicate environment can be stabilized.

Unmentioned in the article is one of the planned remedies set forth in the French Ministry of Culture's report (click on Nov. 20, if you read French) about the problem---the "replacement of the climate control system" in 2008. As I previously reported, the installation of a new climate control system at the entrance of the cave a few years ago was blamed by the French scientific journal La Recherche as the likely cause of a shockingly virulent invasion of fungi and bacteria in 2001. These appeared both on the cave's floor and on outcroppings below its decorated walls.

Now that a team of microbiologists has provided a scientific update on the problem, we need another team of outside experts to be brought in---one that can craft an effective solution to the urgent problem of preserving one of the world's great cultural treasures. For now, it's off limits to just about everyone except persistent microscopic invaders.