The French are letting fungus destroy one of mankind’s most important artistic treasures, according to this story. The Lascaux cave, with its 17,000-year-old paintings, have been described as man’s “first affirmation of himself, and expression of his own newness–when, by the ways and means of art, he entered into contact with the power, brilliance, and joyful mastery of a force that is essentially the force of a beginning, or a beginning-again.”