Lions on a cave wall lift NOVA's Chauvet documentary a hundredfold

A week after its release, NOVA's full film on the painted cave in southern France had its biggest day, and the comments filled with viewers doing the math on how far back these artists lived.

Channel: NOVA PBS OfficialStory of October 2, 2026Trari Newsroom

Why this story? The video is running at 68,856 views a day, 101 times its usual pace (683).

Stone Age Masterpiece | Full Documentary | NOVA | PBS

Chauvet found its audience. NOVA posted its full documentary on the painted cave on September 24, and the film spent its first week moving slowly. Then it drew close to 69,000 views in a single day, about a hundred times its earlier pace.

The cave itself has waited much longer. A rockfall sealed it some 20,000 years ago, and it was only rediscovered in 1994. Its walls hold lions, mammoths and rhinos that are among the oldest and best-preserved Stone Age paintings anywhere. The film, produced by GBH for PBS, follows a team of scientists as they piece together the cave's history, from the giant bears that once moved through it to the large fires that lit it. The longest chapter, by a wide margin, is about the paintings themselves and how carefully they were planned.

The comment section picked up along with the views, and most of its comments arrived on that same day. Viewers work out how much further back these painters stand than the builders of Egypt's Old Kingdom. They note how well the artists understood the bodies of the lions they drew. Some remember first seeing the images in a 2010 documentary or in the pages of a magazine years ago. One wishes a bison near the back of the cave had been shown more fully. Another says they had just watched the program on their local PBS station. Perhaps the broadcast sent people looking for the full film.

NOVA has been on the air since 1974, and one of the most-liked comments comes from a viewer who says they have watched it for more than fifty years.

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The numbers

The figures show how sharply an eight-day-old documentary changed pace.

views per day, this video

typical day

683

now

68,856

subscribers

1,520,000

total views

278,527,062

views per day

250,949

typical day: 218,922

the video

views

75,671

likes

1,958

comments

107

days online

8

compared with similar channels (subscribers)

Spark

1,990,000

Real Wild

1,900,000

NOVA PBS Official

1,520,000

Brandon Buckingham

1,360,000

Boy Boy

1,310,000

RocaNews

1,150,000

As of October 2, 2026 · Data source: Trari Social News, Trari Traffic Trends and Ranking Platform, Google YouTube

Subscriber, view, like and comment counts are YouTube's. Rates, usual days, rankings, comparisons and categories are Trari's own calculations.

Where next?

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