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Some places change you simply by standing in them. A cathedral of painted stone deep beneath the ground. A desert cliff covered in the animals of a vanished world. A field of boulders carved by hands that worked the rock ten thousand years ago. Across the world, in caves and deserts and remote highlands, the galleries of the deep past are waiting. This is a guide to the greatest of them. The places where you can stand, today, before art made tens of thousands of years before

You are standing in the middle of the Sahara. Around you stretches the greatest desert on Earth, a furnace of sand and bare rock where rain may not fall for years on end. Nothing grows. Nothing moves. The silence is total. Then you look at the rock face in front of you, and the world turns upside down. Painted on the stone, in faded ochre and white, a herd of cattle moves across open grassland. Nearby, a hippopotamus wallows. A crocodile basks. Human figures swim through wate

Somewhere in the deep past, a human being looked at a blank rock and saw, in their mind, an animal that was not there. Then they made it appear. In that moment, or rather across thousands of such moments scattered through the long dawn of our species, something extraordinary happened. A creature began to do what no creature had ever done. To take an idea from inside the mind and set it down in the world. To let a mark of pigment stand for a living beast. To imagine, and then