A Way For The Universe To Know Itself

For the purposes of this article, I will mainly be focusing on prehistoric cave art from the European Paleolithic, which is primarily centered around northern Spain and southern France. Prehistoric cave and rock art has been found all over the world, from the Sahara to Australia to the American Southwest and the Amazon, but for a good amount of this there is a living tradition of Indigenous peoples who have maintained connections to this art (Silberman, et al., 2012). With prehistoric European art, however, these connections have long since been severed by continuous population movements and changes in lifeways, beliefs, and practices. Just the existence of such art in Europe alone wasn't even publicly known before 1879 (David, 2017), so we have to rely on comparative methods from ethnography as well as the ongoing research of archaeologists.

The Range of Paleolithic European Cave Art

Depiction of horses and bison from Cueva de Ekain, País Vasco/Basque Country, Spain (Xabier Eskisabel, CC BY-SA 3.0)

"Rock art, sensu stricto, denotes any form of artistic activity on rock" (Silberman, et al. 2012). Much of the cave art I'm interested in here are pictographs, petroglyphs, and engravings: images painted, carved, or incised on the rock surfaces of caves.

Generally, most prehistoric art can be attributed to Homo sapiens, although arguments have been made that Neanderthals and other members of Homo practiced some forms of it (Hoffmann, et al. 2018; Capín, 2025). Paint-making kits utilizing ochre and incised lines date to between 100,000 and 55,000 years ago at South African sites, and it seems highly likely that the practice of making cave art emerged in African Homo sapiens, who carried the practice into Eurasia, Oceania, and the Americas (David, 2017). So far, the oldest definitive rock art in Eurasia comes from Indonesia on Sulawesi at 51,200 years old (Oktaviana, et al. 2014).

In Europe, Homo sapiens was making art by 37,000 years ago at the celebrated Chauvet Cave at Ardèche, France. In fact, dating work at the site revealed two phases of artistic activity, from 37-33.5 KYA (KYA = thousand years ago) and from 31-29 KYA until rock-falls began to close the entrance (David, 2017). This is the site showcased on the 2010 Werner Herzog film Cave of Forgotten Dreams: walls flowing with black charcoal depictions of horses, rhinos, and cave lions with an almost animated quality of movement, light, and shadow techniques. The Arcy-sur-Cure caves and rockshelters of Burgundy, France date to between 28-27 KYA and showcase images of multiple Ice Age species which were revealed through infrared and ultraviolet photography, as the pieces had been encased in a calcite coating since their creation (David, 2017).

Most other cave art in Europe dates to after 27 KYA and lasts in various regions until the tail-end of the Pleistocene Epoch around 11,700 years ago. Lascaux, in Dordogne, France, will be immediately familiar to students of the Ice Age, with its "Hall of the Bulls" depicting enormous aurochs, deer, and horses as well as the mysterious image of a bird-headed person and an eviscerated bison. Altamira, this time in Cantabria, Spain, features polychrome images (in red ochre and black charcoal) of many bison and more abstract forms. The Cougnac caves of Dordogne, France - like many sites- have separate chambers with a seeming focus on specific animals like mammals or birds, which were determined to have been painted by two separate human cultures separated by 10,000 years (David, 2017). The controversial "Sorcerer", a human figure with deer features, hails from caves in the Pyrenees and is accompanied by bison-people and bird-people. Though often underappreciated in some surveys of prehistoric art, at several sites like Laussel and Angles-sur-Anglin are depictions of human profiles and full bodies, at times with sex organs or even sex positions highlighted (Guthrie, 2005; White, 2003). It should also be noted that the cave art we have is often accompanied by mysterious symbols. Animals or objects may be accompanied by patterns of dots, lines, or geometric shapes, and some caves from the earliest times contain several non-figurative signs that look for-all-the-world like written letters.

Nearly all of these sites have been recovered in regions where the paintings and engravings have been safe from wind, rain, and other elemental forces; i.e. caves, whether close to the surface or a mile underground. It seems highly likely that there was visible art elsewhere on the landscape - as it is in other more recent sites - but it could also be that such art was only meant for deeper recesses, to be viewed in certain contexts, hence its ubiquity in such locations (White, 2003). It will always be difficult to test such hypotheses.

All such art is associated with recognizable archaeological cultures, representing widespread societies of Homo sapiens throughout the history of Paleolithic Europe: the Aurignacian, Gravettian, Solutrean, Magdalenian, and Epigravettian, and sometimes individual walls were painted by distinct peoples of these groups across thousands of years. What is interesting to note about these cultures is that research suggests they were not uniformly hunter-gatherers of a nomadic type. While the earliest European Sapiens seem to have lived in a similar fashion to nomadic bands, the scale of some of the recovered cave art and its associated context suggest varied levels of social organization, a factor I'll return to (Condemi & Savatier, 2019).

The Range of Modern Cave Art

First Nations Australian rock art from the Kimberley region (Claire Taylor, CC BY-SA 2.0)

There have been ethnographically-documented living peoples who create art on cave or rock walls, and today anthropologists continue to work with their descendants to understand and preserve these traditions.

Aboriginal or First Nations peoples in Australia and Tasmania have maintained distinct living rock art traditions stretching back thousands of years. In the Cape York Peninsula of eastern Australia, dating techniques show that by 6,000 years ago a number of depictions of figurative beings: one area boasted human-animal hybrids or therianthropes, another featured moths, one had shown spirit-beings, and so on. Comparisons between these and the recorded distribution of linguistic groups in the region during the early years of colonialism has suggested to anthropologists that these different artistic traditions may represent specific clan totems and, thus, territories for certain nations (David, 2017). In contrast to the relatively small region in western Europe where cave art is most prominent, Australia spans a vast geographic area and encompasses disparate peoples and rock art styles, and so cannot be viewed simplistically as just "First Nations Art" (White, 2003).

As in Europe, rock art showcases extant and long-extinct animals, including thylacines, kangaroos, giant snakes, and the marsupial-lion Thylacoleo. In Arnhem Land, on the Northern territory, is a type of X-ray style which showcases the interior anatomy of humans and other animals, including the skeleton and certain organs. The Bradshaw or Gwion Gwion style of the Kimberly Region of western Australia features a number of different depictions of human beings in various garbs and holding different objects. Artists utilized red hematite, white kaolin clay, and other natural pigments to create these works, and sometimes they even used their own blood (White, 2003; David, 2017).

Another region of the world with an on-going rock art tradition into recent times is among the Bushmen or San of southern Africa, including sites such as Brandberg in Namibia and Drakensberg in South Africa. The art here is, as elsewhere, of a wide range of styles, with some depictions of animals being hyper-realistic down to successful species identification, while others are more abstract or exaggerated. There are images of humans too, some with elaborate dress or in scenes of foraging, dance, and battle. The oldest, from Apollo 11 Cave in Namibia, date to 30 KYA (David, 2017). In more recent times, anthropologists have detected roughly two phases of art in southern Africa: prior to the arrival of Bantu-speaking agriculturalists, images are usually painted in just two colors and the style is more "restful", whereas after the arrival of new peoples the style grows "almost frantic" with increases scenes of conflict and animals depicted with less realism (Severin, 1973).

For Native Americans across the northern and southern continents, there are living traditions and connections to prehistoric rock art, with North America in particular having pieces dating back 7,000 years (Silberman, et al. 2012). In the American Southwest, we see representations of ceremonial and religious motifs. On the Great Plains, Indigenous scholars speak of "Biographical Art" which depicts historic events and figures. One remarkable find at the site of Naj Tunich cave in Guatemala preserves art from the Classic Maya Period, including glyphs, which - thanks to modern scholarship and collaboration with living Maya peoples - we can understand (David, 2017).

What Do Rock Artists Say?

Depiction of hoofed mammals at Tsodilo Hills, Botswana (Oliver Vass, CC BY-SA 3.0)

As you may have gathered, different rock art from around the world means different things to their respective artists, though some commonalities that can be drawn between sites across regions.

For some First Nations Australians, rock art conveyed spiritual meanings. Baldwin Spencer and Frank Gillen, working in 1899 among the Arrernte people, learned that artists (always men) sought out sacred places for their paintings which were associated with totems, and that only they could visit them during the context of rituals (Gunn, 1999). Other art was less restrictive, and recorded both supernatural beings & stories and natural phenomena & events, including the arrival of European ships (White, 2003). A common instance across much of Australian art is the Dreaming or Dreamtime, a shared story of creation, and demarcate the paths or songlines that ancestral beings took during these early days.

Much of Bushman art also depicts historical events and the goings on of everyday life. Different ethnic groups are drawn in their own unique styles, emphasizing distinctions between communities (Severin, 1973). There is a spiritual element to these images as well. Ethnographic accounts show that much of this rock art was produced by shamanistic artists undergoing ritual trances, depicting elements of San cosmology and beliefs. Specific animals, like the eland antelope, are given prominence for just such reasons: the eland is a symbol of the transformative state of shamans. Some of the figurative images are accompanied by geometric shapes and patterns which are thought to been the visualization of images seen under entoptic or chemical influences (White, 2003). Likewise, among Amerindian peoples, some of the rock art is said to have been produced under spiritually-induced trances, while others are, aforementioned, accounts of history (Silberman, et al. 2012).

Can we say, then, that some of the cave art produced during the European Paleolithic was a result of religious experiences for spiritual customs, or that others were made to record the world around them?

What Do Anthropologists Say?

Depiction of extinct hyena and leopard at Chauvet Cave, Ardèche, France (Carla Hufstedler, Public Domain)

The earliest research done by European scientists on cave art during the late 1800s was rather dismissive of these pieces: they were seen as lazy doodles with no aesthetic meaning by peoples with increased leisure time. By the 1900s, the understanding had now shifted that the art was a kind of sympathetic magic or fertility magic, made during rituals to control nature for successful hunts of the particular animals being depicted. By this time, ethnographic research was informing researchers, and there was much emphasis on cave art being primarily spiritual in quality. However, early anthropologists had been partially misguided; they saw First Nations Australians and the other hunter-gatherer peoples they studied as primitives in a simple state-of-nature. There were religious elements to much of the art they produced, it was true, but in their Eurocentric-framework scientists argued that their beliefs were simple and only concerned with the hunt (David, 2017).

In fact, since that time, it has fallen out of practice to rely too heavily on modern forager peoples to inform on prehistoric cave art and the people who produced them, just because their shared modes of food-production were through hunting and gathering. A quick sweep through the ethnographic record reveals diverse hunter-gatherer lifeways with innumerable particularities in religious modes and spiritual beliefs, besides, and just because one group painted animals to symbolize totems or creation myths, doesn't necessarily mean that prehistoric Europeans did the same.

I've already mentioned that Paleolithic cultures do not appear to have all been nomadic hunter-gatherers, so just like living forager groups, their social organization varied in important ways. For example, it has been proposed that the Aurignacians shared a sense of common origin in the way that ethnographically-documented tribal societes have, unlike smaller-scale nomadic bands, whereas the Gravettians and Magdalenians may have been semi-sedentary and gathered into small villages supporting even larger numbers of people than tribal groups. Such levels of organization suggest the possibility that cave art of such complexity as seen in Chauvet or Lascaux was able to be produced through specialized labor, by people who were not focused on providing food but instead could hone their artistic abilities over time (Condemi & Savatier, 2019). The takeaway here is that there was no "average prehistoric European", even at the earliest stages of Sapiens' presence there, so we shouldn't expect super similar cultures producing art under the same customs.

Nowadays, anthropologists take a holistic approach to understanding cave art, one that factors in the available archaeological evidence as well as ethnographic inferences, but without relying too heavily on one or the other.

When studying cave art of the Magdalenian or Epigravettian cultures, researchers note several factors. Images were painted or engraved in areas that were not used as living spaces; they are often found in caves that were quite dangerous to traverse - in an age of torches and lamps of oil or fat, those who navigated them knew what they were doing; patterns of wear on stalactites and acoustic-studies in some of the caves suggest that sound seemed to have played a role in art production; the in-situ natural features of caves were often used to help give art-subjects form and motion; by all accounts, depictions of hunting or wounded animals are rare to nonexistent; and, notably, what physical remains of human activity like hand or footprints are present show that all sexes were using the caves and creating these pieces, not just males (White, 2003). Such data has helped refute several classic hypotheses over the last century that you may have read about in vintage paleo-books.

As we've seen previously, some caves were visited by people belonging to distinct cultures and living across thousands of years. 10,000 years span the time of activity at the Cougnac caves of Dordogne, France. This is almost as long as the full history of humans during the Holocene Epoch; twice as long as the entire written record. There is no justifiable way to argue that the artists throughout all that time made art with the exact same meaning.

Several studies over the years have, thus, developed unique explanations for different cave sites, all with fair probability and not mutually-exclusive. As accounted by Jo Marchant in The Human Cosmos, some researchers like Norbert Aujoulat and Michael Rappenglück argued that the cave art of Lascaux may have had astronomical functions. Their analyses show that certain animals were painted in a specific order and style that represents seasonal changes associated with mating, and it is hypothesized that the large aurochs in the "Hall of the Bulls" may be a depiction of the constellation Taurus, complete with dots representing the Pleiades star cluster (Marchant, 2020).

More recent work by Bennett Bacon and colleagues draw attention to the non-figurative letter-like symbols that often accompany animal pieces, some of which date back to the dawn of European Homo sapiens. Their research indicates that there is a communicative function to these symbols, which conveyed calendrical information to various animals and their behavior as shown in the caves. In other words, a form of early writing (Bacon, 2023). In fact, at cave sites around the world, similar symbols have been found with strong similarities in regions as far apart as North America and Australia; it is implied, then, that early Homo sapiens developed this symbolic ability in Africa and brought it into Eurasia and beyond (George, 2016).

Some prehistoric cave art in Europe depicted the world as it was through an understanding of natural history. Others may have been related to spiritual matters, the particulars of which are lost to time. Some may have been produced by specialized artists, others may have been activities the whole group participated in. Others still may have completely different functions. There is no one-size-fits-all approach to studying prehistoric cave art, and modern rock artists do not have all the answers. Like much of human history, even as far back as 30,000 years ago, it's complicated.

Book References

Silvana Condemi & François Savatier - A Pocket History of Human Evolution (The Experiment, 2019)

Bruno David - Cave Art (“World of Art” series, Thames & Hudson, 2017)

R. Dave Guthrie - The Nature of Paleolithic Art (The University of Chicago Press, 2005)

Jo Marchant - The Human Cosmos: Civilization and the Stars (Penguin Random House LLC, 2020)

Timothy Severin - The Horizon Book of Vanishing Primitive Man (American Heritage Publishing Co, 1973)

Neil Asher Silberman, et al. - The Oxford Companion To Archaeology: 2nd Edition (Oxford University Press, 2012)

Randall White - Prehistoric Art: The Symbolic Journey of Humankind (Harry N. Abrams, Inc., 2003)

Paper and Article Citations

Bennett Bacon, et al. 2023. An Upper Palaeolithic Proto-writing System and Phenological Calendar (Cambridge Archaeological Journal)

Paul Bahn, 2005. A Lot of Bull? Pablo Picasso and Ice Age cave art (MUNIBE: Antropologia-Arkeologia)

Miriam García Capín, 2025. Neanderthal cave art? A proposal from cognitive archaeology (Journal of Archaeological Science: Reports)

Alison George, 2016. "Code hidden in Stone Age art may be the root of human writing" (NewScientist)

Robert G. Gunn, 1999. Spencer and Gillen's contribution to Australian rock-art studies. (Academia)

Dirk. L. Hoffmann, et al. 2018. U-Th dating of carbonate crusts reveals Neandertal origin of Iberian cave art (Science)