Perhaps, concludes McBurney, ‘this is what truly separates us’ from the makers of this art: ‘not the space of time but the sense of time . . . In our minute splicing of our lives into milliseconds, we live separated from everything that surrounds us.’ Certainly, the three discoverers of the cave recognized, as they stood there that first day in 1994, something of that older sense of being. ‘It was as if time had been abolished,’ wrote Jean-Marie Chauvet, ‘as if the tens of thousands of years of separation no longer existed, and we were not alone, the painters were here too.’
