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After days of travelling, the land begins to rise. The flat sand gives way to something stranger, a vast plateau of weathered stone that climbs out of the desert like the ruin of a drowned continent. Towers of rock stand in their thousands. Arches and pinnacles throw long shadows across the sand. It looks less like a place on Earth than a vision of another planet. This is Tassili n'Ajjer. Hidden among its stone lies one of the greatest treasures of the ancient world. Climb on

On a cliff in Argentina, hundreds of hands reach out of the rock. Red, black, ochre, they cluster across the stone in their multitudes, the outlines of human palms sprayed onto the surface thousands of years ago. The place is called the Cave of Hands, and to stand within it is overwhelming. A silent crowd, reaching out across nine thousand years. The same gesture appears on the far side of the world. In the caves of Indonesia. On the walls of Europe. Across Africa, Australia,

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