In the year 1879, a father and his young daughter set out on an adventure: to explore a cave on their property near Altamira, Spain. Marcelino Sanz de Sautola was the father. An amateur archaeologist, he had visited the cave many times, searching for prehistoric artifacts. His daughter, Maria, was eight or nine years old at the time.

            Marcelino held the lantern. Its flickering light cast their shadows — one large, one small — on the cave walls. He looked down at the floor, as he always did, hoping the lantern-light would reveal some chipped-stone axe-head, some fragment of bone, left behind by the prehistoric people who used to live there.

            The two were making their way toward the back of the cave when Maria called out, “Look, Papa, oxen!”

            She was pointing toward the ceiling. Marcelino looked up, and by the flickering light of his lantern, he beheld something he had never seen before on all his visits to the cave. The ceiling was covered with magnificent drawings in charcoal and red ochre! There were “oxen,” yes, but they weren’t really oxen. They were bison. And there were horses, and a doe and a wild boar.

            Little Maria had discovered one of the most important archaeological treasures of all time. So impressive were these drawings, so skillfully executed, that for quite some time the archaeological world thought they couldn’t possibly be real. The ancient colors were so vivid, the execution very precise. Some experts charged Marcelino with drawing the animals himself.

            But the images in the Altamira cave are no forgery — as the professors of archaeology eventu

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