Timeline

Heritage classified

Key figures

Origin and history

The Bernifal Cave, located in Meyrals, Dordogne (New Aquitaine), is a cave decorated with the Upper Paleolithic, occupied by Man during the Magdalenian (between -15 000 and -10 000 years). It houses 110 engravings and paintings, mainly mammoths, cattle, equidae and tectiform signs, the latter being a rare regional feature. The cave, about 90 meters long, retains an aspect similar to that known by prehistoric men.

The cave was rediscovered in 1902 by Denis Peyrony, then studied by Louis Capitan and Abbé Breuil, followed by Brigitte and Gilles Delluc in the 1990s. Ranked a historical monument since 1904, it is a private property and was the subject of a documentary in 2011, The last prehistoric peasant, after five years of filming. Its tourist access, limited and by reservation since 2000, preserves its integrity.

Among its particularities, Bernifal has a unique tectiforme consisting of hundreds of red dots, as well as a rare human representation with horns or a branch. A clay-shaped mammoth, located high in a hard-to-reach fireplace, illustrates the adaptation of prehistoric artists to natural relief. Only four caves in France, all located near the Eyzies-de-Tayac, have indisputable tectiforms, highlighting the regional importance of this site.

The tectiformes, motifs absent from the art furniture and specific to parietal art, remain enigmatic. Henri Breuil, in 1903, already questioned their meaning, noting their exceptional abundance at Bernifal. These signs, as well as negative hands and painted animals, testify to intense artistic activity during the Magdalenian, a period marked by a cold climate and a society of nomadic hunter-gatherers.

The cave is part of a network of adorned sites discovered in the early 20th century, alongside Altamira, Combarelles or Font-de-Gaume. His study contributed to the understanding of prehistoric art, notably through Véronique Brunet's work on his mammoths (1987) and symbolic analyses such as Julien Starck's (2016). Today, its status as a private cave and its measured tourist exploitation make it a preserved site, far from mass tourism.

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