At their inceptions, both evolutionary theory and prehistory overturned the dominant story of human origins that had been maintained by the church. Evolutionary theory shifted the temporal register from creationist to geological, threatening the church’s claim to the story of our origins. Similarly, the first decades of prehistory’s existence are accompanied by major theological reconfigurations, and a similar ‘loss of transcendence’ was experienced by Bataille during his childhood, demonstrating how prehistory would later become instrumental for his staging of the drama of life in a world articulated through evolutionary theory, geological in temporality, and without higher meaning or direction. Georges Bataille’s work unfolds as part of the ripple effect of these revolutions. This chapter contextualizes Bataille’s life and work in relation to prehistory’s emergence in the late nineteenth century, and its development in the early twentieth century. In particular it outlines significant and intersecting concepts from Bataille’s oeuvre, showing how they eventually resurface in his work at Lascaux. This sets the stage for an argument made later in the book: that Lascaux stands as the culmination of concerns that Bataille had been working on since his early years in Paris.