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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

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