Images from La Marche cave. Palaeolithic art or recent fakes?

In 1937 various Palaeolithic finds were made in the cave of La Marche in southwestern France. Two years later numerous incised drawings, allegedly of the same origin, appeared and were shown to a collector, Leon Pale, who published them. Many of these images are very different from other Palaeolithic drawings, showing human figures, not least women, with clothing and vivid facial expressions, as well as an elephant. This paper argues that the drawings from La Marche, which are sometimes cited in current literature on cave art, are fakes.