When you enter La Vache cave, you step back into the daily lives of Magdalenian cave dwellers...

13,000 years ago, these nomads hunted and fished in the Ariège valleys. Facing south-east, the cave was their shelter from March to September. While much smaller than its neighbour, Niaux, and with no signs of cave paintings, the cave is a treasure house for palaeontologists: they found tens of thousands of sharpened flints, weapons (harpoons and assegais), tools (needles, awls...) and engraved objects made of bone or reindeer antlers. Some are pure marvels of Magdalenian art: geometric decors and very realistic, finely drawn representations of animals.

The biggest cavern contains traces of a camp and tribal home. Tonnes of animal bones were found there. All were broken so as to extract the marrow. We thus learned that reindeer and horses played a major role in the Magdalenian inhabitants' meals, complemented by ibex.