French President Francois Hollande on Friday stepped 36,000 years back in time into a darkened, cool cave to admire the earliest known figurative paintings of hands, bears, rhinos and panthers. But he was actually above ground, inaugurating a giant, millimetre-by-millimetre exact replica of the closely guarded Grotte Chauvet in southern France, unearthed by chance in 1994 by a group of speleologists who discovered hundreds of paintings by our prehistoric ancestors. Nestled deep in a limestone cliff that hangs over the meandering Ardeche River, the cave is closed to the public so scientists and artists toiled for years to build the 55-million-euro ($58-million) replica down to cloning even the

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