Aurochs on a cave painting in Lascaux, France

Cave paintings are paintings on cave walls and ceilings, especially those of prehistoric origin. The earliest such rock art in Europe dates back to the Aurignacian period, some 32,000 years ago.^[1] The exact purpose of the paleolithic cave paintings is not known. Evidence suggests that they were not merely decorations of living areas, since the caves in which they have been found do not have signs of ongoing habitation. They are also often located in areas of caves that are not easily accessible. Some theories hold that cave paintings may have been a way of communicating with others, while other theories ascribe them a religious or ceremonial purpose.

History of discovery[link]

Age[link]

Cueva de las Monedas

Nearly 350 caves have now been discovered in France and Spain that contain art from prehistoric times. Initially, the age of the paintings had been a contentious issue, since methods like radiocarbon dating can be misled by contaminated samples of older or newer material,^[2] and caves and rocky overhangs (parietal art) are typically littered with debris from many time periods. But subsequent advances made it possible to date the paintings by sampling the pigment itself and the torch marks on the walls.^[3] The choice of subject matter can also indicate chronology. For instance, the reindeer in the Spanish cave of Cueva de las Monedas, which place the art in the last Ice Age.

The oldest known cave art is that of Chauvet in France, the paintings of which may be 35,000 years old according to radiocarbon dating, and date back to 33,000 BCE (Upper Paleolithic).^[4] Some researchers believe the drawings are too advanced for this era and question this age.^[5] However, over 80 radiocarbon dates had been taken by 2011, with samples taken from torch marks and from the paintings themselves, as well as from animal bones and charcoal found on the cave floor. The radiocarbon dates from these samples show that there were two periods of creation in Chauvet: 35,000 years ago and 30,000 years ago. One of the surprises was that many of the paintings were modified repeatedly over thousands of years, which may explain the confusion about many finer paintings being dated earlier than cruder ones.^[6]

In Australia, however, cave paintings have been found of ancient mega-fauna which have been known to have existed over 40,000 years ago, making this the oldest possible painting. While in February 2012, paintings in Spain were discovered which are thought to be over 42,000 years old based on carbon dating. Other examples may date as late as the Early Bronze Age, but the well known prolific and sophisticated Magdalenian style seen at Lascaux (c. 15,000 BCE) and Altamira died out about 10,000 BCE, coinciding with the advent of the Neolithic period. Some caves probably continued to be painted over a period of several thousands of years.^[7]

Themes and patterns[link]

Spanish cave painting of bulls.

The most common themes in cave paintings are large wild animals, such as bison, horses, aurochs, and deer, and tracings of human hands as well as abstract patterns, called finger flutings. The species found most often were suitable for hunting by humans, but were not necessarily the actual typical prey found in associated deposits of bones; for example the painters of Lascaux have mainly left reindeer bones, but this species does not appear at all in the cave paintings, where equine species are the most common. Drawings of humans were rare and are usually schematic rather than the more detailed and naturalistic images of animal subjects. One explanation for this may be that realistically painting the human form was "forbidden by a powerful religious taboo."^[8]

Pigments used include red and yellow ochre, hematite, manganese oxide and charcoal. Sometimes the silhouette of the animal was incised in the rock first, and in some caves all or many of the images are only engraved in this fashion, taking them somewhat out of a strict definition of "cave painting".

Similar large animals are also the most common subjects in the many small carved and engraved bone or ivory, less often stone, pieces dating from the same periods. But these include the group of Venus figurines, which have no real equivalent in cave paintings.

Theories and interpretations[link]

Henri Breuil interpreted the paintings as being hunting magic, meant to increase the number of animals.

An alternative theory, developed by David Lewis-Williams and broadly based on ethnographic studies of contemporary hunter-gatherer societies, is that the paintings were made by paleolithic shamans.^[9] The shaman would retreat into the darkness of the caves, enter into a trance state and then paint images of their visions, perhaps with some notion of drawing power out of the cave walls themselves.

R. Dale Guthrie^[10] who has studied both highly artistic and publicized paintings and a variety of lower quality art and figurines, identifies a wide range of skill and ages among the artists. He hypothesizes that the main themes in the paintings and other artifacts (powerful beasts, risky hunting scenes and the representation of women in the Venus figurines) are the fantasies of adolescent males, who made a big part of the human population at the time. However, in analysing hand prints and stencils in French and Spanish caves, Dean Snow of Pennsylvania State University has proposed that a proportion of them, including those around the spotted horses in Pech Merle, were of female hands.^[11]

Locations[link]

Africa[link]

Rock paintings from the Western Cape

At uKhahlamba / Drakensberg Park, South Africa, now thought to be some 3,000 years old, the paintings by the San people who settled in the area some 8,000 years ago depict animals and humans, and are thought to represent religious beliefs. Human figures are much more common in the rock art of Africa than in Europe.^[12]

Cave paintings found at the Apollo 11 cave in Namibia are estimated to date from approximately 23,000 – 25,000 BCE.^[13]

In 2002, a French archaeological team discovered the Laas Gaa'l cave paintings on the outskirts of Hargeisa in the northwestern Somaliland region of Somalia. Dating back around 5,000 years, the paintings depict both wild animals and decorated cows. They also feature herders, who are believed to be the creators of the rock art.^[14]

Many cave paintings are found in the Tassili n'Ajjer mountains in southeast Algeria. A UNESCO World Heritage Site, the rock art was first discovered in 1933 and has since yielded 15,000 engravings and drawings that keep a record of the various animal migrations, climatic shifts, and change in human inhabitation patterns in this part of the Sahara from 6000 BCE to the early classical period.^[15] Other cave paintings are also found at the Akakus, Mesak Settafet and Tadrart in Libya and other Sahara regions including: Ayr mountains, Niger and Tibesti, Chad.

The Cave of Swimmers is a cave in southwest Egypt, near the border with Libya, in the mountainous Gilf Kebir region of the Sahara Desert. It was discovered in October 1933 by the Hungarian explorer László Almásy. It contains rock painting images of people swimming estimated to have been created 10,000 years ago during the time of the most recent Ice Age.

Australia[link]

Significant early cave paintings have been found in Kakadu, Australia. Ochre is a not an organic material, so carbon dating of these pictures is often impossible. Sometimes the approximate date, or at least, an epoch, can be surmised from the painting content, contextual artifacts, or organic material intentionally or inadvertently mixed with the inorganic ochre paint, including torch soot.^[3]

A red ochre painting discovered at the centre of the Arnhem Land plateau about two years ago depicts two emu-like birds with their necks outstretched. They have been identified by a palaeontologist as depicting the megafauna species Genyornis. The giant birds were thought to have become extinct more than 40,000 years ago but this may suggest that they existed later than that.^[16]

The Whitsunday Islands are also home to a surprising number of cave paintings. The cave paintings by the sea-faring Ngaro people on Hook Island, Australia, are remarkable for their non-figurative, non-representational, or abstract content. Their significance is a mystery.

Europe[link]

30,000 year old spotted hyena painting found in the Chauvet Cave.

Well known cave paintings include those of:

• Lascaux, France
• Grotte de Cussac, France
• Pech Merle, near Cabrerets, France
• La Marche, in Lussac-les-Châteaux, France
• Chauvet Cave, near Vallon-Pont-d'Arc, France
• Cave of Niaux, France
• Cosquer Cave, with an entrance below sea level near Marseille, France
• Font-de-Gaume, in the Dordogne Valley in France
• Cave of Altamira, near Santillana del Mar, Cantabria, Spain
• Cueva de La Pasiega, Cuevas de El Castillo, Cantabria, Spain

Other sites include Creswell Crags, Nottinghamshire, England, (Cave etchings and bas-reliefs discovered in 2003), and Magura [1], Belogradchik, Bulgaria. Rock painting was also performed on cliff faces, but fewer of those have survived because of erosion. One well-known example is the rock paintings of Astuvansalmi in the Saimaa area of Finland. When Marcelino Sanz de Sautuola first encountered the Magdalenian paintings of the Altamira cave, Cantabria, Spain in 1879, the academics of the time considered them hoaxes. Recent reappraisals and numerous additional discoveries have since demonstrated their authenticity, while at the same time stimulating interest in the artistry of Upper Palaeolithic peoples. Cave paintings, undertaken with only the most rudimentary tools, can also furnish valuable insight into the culture and beliefs of that era.

India[link]

Bhimbetka rock painting

The Bhimbetka rock shelters exhibit the earliest traces of human life in India; a number of analyses suggest that some of these shelters were inhabited by humans for in excess of 100,000 years. The earliest paintings on the cave walls are believed to be of the Mesolithic period, dating to 12,000 years ago. The most recent painting, consisting of geometric figures, date to the medieval period. Executed mainly in red and white with the occasional use of green and yellow, the paintings depict the lives and times of the people who lived in the caves, including scenes of childbirth, communal dancing and drinking, religious rites and burials, as well as indigenous animals.^[17]

North America[link]

Painted Cave, Santa Barbara County, California

Native artists in the Chumash tribes created cave paintings that are located in present day Santa Barbara, Ventura, and San Luis Obispo Counties in Southern California. They include well executed examples at Burro Flats Painted Cave and Chumash Painted Cave State Historic Park.

There are also Native American pictogram examples in caves of the Southwestern United States.

South America[link]

Serra da Capivara National Park is a national park in the north east of Brazil. It has many prehistoric paintings. The park was created to protect the prehistoric artifacts and paintings found there. It became a World Heritage Site in 1991. Its head archaeologist is Niède Guidon. Its best known archaeological site is Pedra Furada. It is located in southeast state of Piauí, between latitudes 8° 26' 50" and 8° 54' 23" south and longitudes 42° 19' 47" and 42° 45' 51" west. It falls within the municipal areas of São Raimundo Nonato, São João do Piauí, Coronel José Dias and Canto do Buriti. It has an area of 1291.4 square kilometres (319,000 acres). The area has the largest concentration of prehistoric small farms on the American continents. Scientific studies confirm that the Capivara mountain range was densely populated in prehistoric periods.

Cueva de las Manos (Spanish for Cave of the Hands) in the Santa Cruz province in Argentina

Cueva de las Manos (Spanish for "Cave of the Hands") is a cave located in the province of Santa Cruz, Argentina, 163 km (101 mi) south from the town of Perito Moreno, within the borders of the Francisco P. Moreno National Park, which includes many sites of archaeological and paleontogical importance.

The images of hands are often negative (stencilled). Besides these there are also depictions of human beings, guanacos, rheas, felines and other animals, as well as geometric shapes, zigzag patterns, representations of the sun, and hunting scenes. Similar paintings, though in smaller numbers, can be found in nearby caves. There are also red dots on the ceilings, probably made by submerging their hunting bolas in ink, and then throwing them up. The colours of the paintings vary from red (made from hematite) to white, black or yellow. The negative hand impressions are calculated to be dated around 550 BC, the positive impressions from 180 BC, and the hunting drawings to be older than 10,000 years.^[18]

Most of the hands are left hands, which suggests that painters held the spraying pipe with their dexterous hand.^{[citation needed]} The size of the hands resembles that of a 13-year-old boy, but considering they were probably smaller in size, it is speculated that they could be a few years older, and marked their advancement into manhood by stamping their hands on the walls of this sacred cave.^{[citation needed]}

Southeast Asia[link]

There are rock paintings in caves in Thailand, Malaysia, Indonesia, and Burma. In Thailand, caves and scarps along the Thai-Burmese border, in the Petchabun Range of Central Thailand, and overlooking the Mekong River in Nakorn Sawan Province, all contain galleries of rock paintings. In Malaysia the oldest paintings are at Gua Tambun in Perak, dated at 2000 years, and those in the Painted Cave at Niah Caves National Park are 1200 years old. The anthropologist Ivor Hugh Norman Evans visited Malaysia in the early 1920s and found that some of the tribes (especially Negritos) were still producing cave paintings and had added depictions of modern objects including what are believed to be cars.^[19] See prehistoric Malaysia. In Indonesia the caves at Maros in Sulawesi are famous for their hand prints, also recently found in 38 painted caves in the Sangkulirang area of Kalimantan.^[20] The Padah-Lin Caves of Burma contain 11,000-year-old paintings and many rock tools.

Gallery[link]

• 

  Male hunter or warrior, in Kakadu National Park, Australia

• 

  Wallaby, Kakadu National Park

• 

  An elaborate turtle

• 

  Fish in an X-ray-style painting, Kakadu National Park

• 

  A macropod's (probably kangaroo's) skeleton

• 

  Hunters and elephants, from Cederberg, South Africa

• 

  Bhimbetka rock shelters in Madhya Pradesh, India, .

See also[link]

• Venus figurines
• Parietal art
• Petroglyph
• Prehistoric art
• Upper Paleolithic art
• Sympathetic magic
• Ochre

References[link]