Commune with Cro-Magnon: Europe's stunning prehistoric paintings

Deep in a tall and narrow cave at the top of a rocky hill in remote northern Spain, we crept, bent over, in the very space where shamans painted delicate images of cave bison and mammoths on limestone 1,500 generations ago, to invoke the animal spirits for our Ice Age ancestors. Cantabrian caves scholar Daniel Garrido switched off his lantern. Four of us stood in silence. "In total darkness, these artists journeyed to Mother Earth," he nearly whispered. "Can you feel it?"

Feeling what those Ice Age men (and maybe women), our close relatives, felt is the haunting fun of a trip to the prehistoric cave areas of Cantabrian Spain, where Hornos de la Pena is among 18 art-filled caverns. There are another 15 caves in southwestern France, just across the Pyrenees. Several tour organizations offer expeditions that cover caves in France and/or Spain; touring them by yourself, enjoying the beautiful regions while visiting some of the caves, is also possible, with advance ticketing (see details below).

For travelers seeking to experience the ancient world, there's nothing else like it on Earth – not even close. You may have stood in the Colosseum, trying to conjure the Romans who hauled the stones and fought the lions there, 2,000 years ago. Or walked on the Great Wall of China, about 2,200 years old. Or the windy plain at Stonehenge, trying to imagine how and why Megalithic men raised those boulders 5,500 years ago.

But trying to put yourself in the same place as the Cro-Magnon cave artists of the Upper Paleolithic period (50,000-15,000 years ago) is a leap through time and space far beyond. In Hornos de la Pena, for instance, the oldest animal paintings were made 18,000 years ago (more than three times older than Stonehenge). And in a very famous cave nearby, El Castillo, the oldest was made 40,800 years ago. There, as in nearly all the caves, there is a huge date range, over many millennia, even within one cave.

This is art, not scribblings or graffiti. The drawings are delicate and sensuous. Often, the artists used the natural lines of the stone to create bellies or necks or striding legs of beasts. Their creatures show motion, and – in places – even emotion. At France's Font de Gaume cave, you see a famous deer licking another. In that same cave, the only one with polychrome paintings that is still open to visitors, you see a famous group of colorful bison painted using the convex and concave lines of the stone.

"They were just on the frontier of mastering space. You see the interface of reality and illusion," said our Font de Gaume guide, Jean-Pierre Vanzo, as he used a flickering flashlight to show us how they worked by tiny oil lamps.

The prehistoric painters probably were shamans trying to invoke the spirits of the animals they drew, according to the expert guides we met during a National Geographic expedition across the region. When the paintings were first discovered in the late 1800s, the artists were thought to have simply copied the everyday animals on their Ice Age steppe environment. Over the past hundred years, the thinking has evolved, because most of the creatures you will see – mammoths and bison and oryx – were rare even then. Across all the caves of Europe, you will not see birds, insects, landscapes, moon or sun or stars, and almost no human images – just a few stick figures in scattered caves, some with long tails or exaggerated sex organs.

These caves were quite apart from daily existence. They never were used as living space, and almost never for burials.

Some of the caves were sealed by landslides over the millennia, but some, like Font de Gaume, have always been open. Local people had known of them for centuries. "But remember, when people saw these beautiful drawings and etchings, they had no reason to see prehistoric work, because we've only known about pre-history since the mid-19th century," said expert Christine Desdemaines-Hugon.

Lascaux, in the Dordogne region of France, sometimes called Prehistory's Sistine Chapel, was discovered in 1940, when a dog sniffed around a crevasse and his teenage owner followed him down. Another of the world-famous sites, Altamira in northern Spain, was discovered in 1880, the very first one. Local people had been inside but no one had noticed the astonishing brilliant ceiling until an amateur archaeologist was there with his small daughter and she pointed overhead (Antonio Banderas stars as that archaeologist in a new film set to be released later this year).

Soon after some of the caves opened to tourists after World War II, lichen and fungus began to degrade the walls. The carbon dioxide and foot traffic altered the humidity and temperature that had been constant for hundreds of thousands of years, causing calcite to build up. At Lascaux, thousands filed through each year from 1948-63. Eventually, it was completely closed to visits, and a cool and dimly lit exact replica just a few hundred yards away is what you can tour today. Still another exact model is under construction nearby because the traffic to Lascaux II has overwhelmed the area. The good news: The real Lascaux has largely revived since it's been closed. The bad: Only conservators can see it now.

France now also limits other, less-well-known caves. But Pech Merle, called "an art gallery in a palace of nature" because of its glorious stalagtites as well as very unusual 25,000-year-old paintings, is still ticketed for limited groups. Font de Gaume, where the art is 15,000 years old, has cut back drastically on the daily and annual tour limits. Our guide there, Mr. Vanzo, told me that he is optimistic the limits will work. "If we are careful, this could stay open for small numbers of visitors for a long time. But we must be careful. These are jewels." French law now prohibits any newly discovered painted caves from being opened to the public at all.

Spain similarly limits access to the caves. At Altamira, like Lascaux, there is only a replica available to visitors. They are experimenting with a lottery where they give access to the real cave to a very few lucky tourists there on Friday. When my husband, Dave, and I explored Hornos de la Pena, much less well-known, our group was limited to four at a time.

Witnessing the art in Hornos de La Pena, and all the caves – real and replica – is a unique trip through time and space, and still available. It is humbling and inspiring to stand in the very spot where our Ice Age ancestors summoned animal spirits to bless their survival. Our group toasted the power of those spirits!

Seeing Europe's painted caves

Find more information, plus ticketing and reservations for:

• All caves in Cantrabria region, Spain: cuevas.culturadecantabria.com

• Altamira cave (replica) and museum, Spain: en.museodealtamira.mcu.es

• Font de Gaume cave, Les Eyzies, Dordogne, France: eyzies.monuments-nationaux.fr

• Lascaux II cave (replica), Montignac, Dordogne, France: lascaux.culture.fr

• Pech Merle cave, Lot region, France: pechmerle.com/english/visite

• French National Museum of Prehistory in Les Eyzies, Dordogne: musee-prehistoire-eyzies.fr