Reader's Digest: March 18, 2023

In a recent TLS, Richard Beard reviewed The Lascaux Notebooks, a collection of verse attributed to Jean-Luc Champerret. It’s described by the publisher as “the oldest poetry yet discovered,” based on 17,000-year-old markings in the Lascaux caves. According to the jacket copy, “Philip Terry's contribution is to have discovered and rendered this seminal, hitherto unsuspected work into English.”

While archaeologists maintain that these signs are uninterpretable, Champerret assigns them meanings by analogy, then—in an inspired act of creative reading—inserts them into the frequent 3 x 3 grids to be found at Lascaux. The results—revelation of Ice-Age poetry—are startling.

Having been intrigued enough to read the book a while back, what startled me in the review were the scare-quotes, citing Terry’s “research,” in which he “learns” that Champerret was a French resistance codebreaker who scouted the caves as a potential hideout in 1940 and was inspired by what he found.

Champerret turns out to …