Treasuring the Creative Commons

The spell of rock art typically falls over people slowly. You might stumble across a pecking or a painting on a canyon wall that sparks some curiosity. The next time, perhaps, it grows to intrigue. If you’re lucky, it becomes fascination, passion, and maybe even obsession. For longtime National Geographic photographer Stephen Alvarez, that magical enchantment happened in a mere instant, and in that instant he understood that something was forever changed in him.

The year was 2014 and the magazine had assigned him to shoot a story called “Origins of Art,” centered in a cave called Chauvet-Pont-d’Arc, in southern France, which holds some of the oldest and most artistically sublime rock paintings in Europe. Discovered by cavers in 1994, Chauvet’s walls display a panel of hunting lionesses fifteen feet long, extinct wild cattle called aurochs, galloping horses, hand prints, and hundreds of other elements. The art is located deep within the grotto, which was also home to twelve-foot cave bears. Creating the paintings