A 27,000-year-old human skeleton laid out in a room decorated with ancient art and a crude representation of a face are among the rare finds in a cave in western France, officials said yesterday.

The state took over ownership of the cave in the Vilhonneur forest on May 12, the French Culture Ministry said in a statement.

It was only the second time that a human body is known to have been placed in a decorated cave from the Upper Paleolithic Period, the ministry said.

A single face drawn in the cave could be among the world's oldest known graphic representations of a human face, said Jean-Yves Baratin, archeology curator for the Poitou-Charentes region.