Cave paintings are a type of parietal art (which category also includes petroglyphs, or
engravings), found on the wall or ceilings of caves. The term usually implies prehistoric origin, but
cave paintings can also be of recent production: In the Gabarnmung cave of northern Australia,
the oldest paintings certainly predate 28,000 years ago, while the most recent ones were made
less than a century ago.[3]
The oldest known cave paintings are over 40,000 years old (art of the Upper Paleolithic), found in
both the Franco-Cantabrian region in western Europe, and in the caves in the district of
Maros (Sulawesi, Indonesia). The oldest type of cave paintings are hand stencils and simple
geometric shapes; the oldest undisputed examples of figurative cave paintings are somewhat
younger, close to 35,000 years old. [4] A 2018 study claimed an age of 64,000 years for the oldest
examples of (non-figurative) cave art in Iberia, which would imply production
by Neanderthals rather than modern humans.[5] In November 2018, scientists reported the
discovery of the oldest known figurative art painting, over 40,000 (perhaps as old as 52,000)
years old, of an unknown animal, in the cave of Lubang Jeriji Saléh on the Indonesian island
of Borneo.[1][2]
Contents
1Dating
2Subjects, themes, and patterns
o 2.1Theories and interpretations
3Paleolithic cave art by region
o 3.1Europe
o 3.2East and Southeast Asia
o 3.3India
o 3.4Southern Africa
o 3.5Australia
4Holocene cave art
o 4.1Asia
o 4.2Horn of Africa
o 4.3North Africa
o 4.4Southern Africa
o 4.5North America
o 4.6South America
o 4.7Southeast Asia
5See also
6References
7Further reading
8External links
Dating[edit]
Nearly 340 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 produce misleading results if contaminated by samples of older or
newer material,[6] and caves and rocky overhangs (where parietal art is found) are typically littered
with debris from many time periods. But subsequent technology has made it possible to date the
paintings by sampling the pigment itself, torch marks on the walls, [7] or the formation of carbonate
deposits on top of the paintings.[8] The subject matter can also indicate chronology: for instance,
the reindeer depicted in the Spanish cave of Cueva de las Monedas places the drawings in the
last Ice Age.
The oldest known cave painting is a red hand stencil in Maltravieso cave, Cáceres, Spain. It has
been dated using the uranium-thorium method[8] to older than 64,000 years and was made by
a Neanderthal.[5] The oldest date given to an animal cave painting is now a bull dated circa as
over 40 000 years, at Lubang Jeriji Saléh cave, East Kalimantan, Borneo, Indonesia. [9] Before this
discovery, the oldest known cave painting was a depiction of a pig with a minimum age of 35,400
years, at Timpuseng cave in Sulawesi, Indonesia. [4]
The earliest known European figurative cave paintings are those of Chauvet Cave in France.
These paintings date to earlier than 30,000 BCE (Upper Paleolithic) according
to radiocarbon dating.[10] Some researchers believe the drawings are too advanced for this era
and question this age.[11] However, more than 80 radiocarbon dates had been obtained 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, possibly explaining the confusion about finer paintings that seemed to date earlier than
cruder ones.[12]
An artistic depiction of a group of rhinoceros, was completed in the Chauvet Cave 30,000 to 32,000 years
ago.
In 2009, cavers discovered drawings in Coliboaia Cave in Romania, stylistically comparable to
those at Chauvet.[13] An initial dating puts the age of an image in the same range as Chauvet:
about 32,000 years old.[14]
In Australia, cave paintings have been found on the Arnhem Land plateau showing megafauna
which are thought to have been extinct for over 40,000 years, making this site another candidate
for oldest known painting; however, the proposed age is dependent on the estimate of the
extinction of the species seemingly depicted.[15] Another Australian site, Nawarla Gabarnmang,
has charcoal drawings that have been radiocarbon-dated to 28,000 years, making it the oldest
site in Australia and among the oldest in the world for which reliable date evidence has been
obtained.[16]
Other examples may date as late as the Early Bronze Age, but the well-known Magdalenian style
seen at Lascaux in France (c. 15,000 BCE) and Altamira in Spain 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.[17]
The next phase of surviving European prehistoric painting, the rock art of the Iberian
Mediterranean Basin, was very different, concentrating on large assemblies of smaller and much
less detailed figures, with at least as many humans as animals. This was created roughly
between 10,000 and 5,500 years ago, and painted in rock shelters under cliffs or shallow caves,
in contrast to the recesses of deep caves used in the earlier (and much colder) period. Although
individual figures are less naturalistic, they are grouped in coherent grouped compositions to a
much greater degree.
Subjects, themes, and patterns[edit]
Prehistoric cave painting of animals at Albarracín, Teruel, Spain (rock art of the Iberian Mediterranean
Basin)
The most common subjects 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 as opposed to the more detailed and naturalistic images of animal
subjects. Kieran D. O'Hara, geologist, suggests in his book Cave Art and Climate Change that
climate controlled the themes depicted.[18] 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".
Similarly, 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. [citation needed]
Hand stencils, made by placing a hand on the wall and blowing pigment at it (probably through a
pipe of some kind), form a characteristic image of a roughly round area of solid pigment with the
uncoloured shape of the hand in the centre, which may then be decorated with lines or dashes.
These are often found in the same caves as other paintings, or may be the only form of painting
in a location. Some walls contain many hand stencils. Similar hands are also painted in the usual
fashion. A number of hands show a finger wholly or partly missing, for which a number of
explanations have been given. Hand images are found in similar forms in Europe, Eastern Asia
and South America.[19]
Theories and interpretations[edit]
Rock paintings from the Cave of Beasts (Gilf Kebir, Libyan Desert) Estimated 7000 BP
Henri Breuil interpreted the paintings as hunting magic to increase the abundance of prey.
Another theory, developed by David Lewis-Williams and broadly based on ethnographic studies
of contemporary hunter-gatherersocieties, is that the paintings were made by
paleolithic shamans.[20] The shaman would retreat into the darkness of the caves, enter into a
trance state, then paint images of his or her visions, perhaps with some notion of drawing out
power from the cave walls themselves.
R. Dale Guthrie, who has studied both highly artistic and lower quality art and figurines, identifies
a wide range of skill and age 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 work of adolescent males, who constituted a large part of
the human population at the time.[21][verification needed] However, in analyzing 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.[22]
