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Henri Lhote


Henri Lhote (1903–1991) was a French author, explorer, ethnographer, and "expert on prehistoric cave art" who described and is credited for the discovery of "important cave paintings" in an "assembly of 800 or more magnificent works of primitive art...in a virtually inaccessible region on the edge of the Sahara desert" Lhote was an early ancient astronaut theorist and considered the prehistoric art as evidence of paleocontact.

In 1933, a French soldier remembered as "Lieutenant Brenans" ventured into a deep wadi in the Tassili-n-ajjer plateau in the southeast Algeria. Although by the 20th century Tassili-n-ajjer was barren and devoid of large animals, there, upon the sandstone cliffs, he saw rock paintings and engravings of elephants, giraffes, rhinoceroses. He also saw images of strange human figures.

Lhote, a pupil of "the great expert on prehistoric cave art in France"Abbé Breuil, was in Algeria at the time and heard about the discovery. He met the soldier at Djanet, learned all he could, then and mounted an expedition to investigate it. Lhote later wrote that he had never seen anything "so extraordinary, so original, so beautiful" as the art at Tassili n'Ajjer. Working with the support of the Musée de l'Homme, Lhote and his associates discovered about 800 paintings, many of which he later made images of with the aid of painters and photographers.

These images were presented in 1957 and 1958 at the Musée des Arts Décoratifs in Paris and were, in the opinion of André Malraux. "one of the most defining exhibitions of the mid-century".


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