Short answers, pulled from the story.
The oldest known cave painting is a handprint from Liang Metanduno on Muna Island, dated to at least 67,800 years old. It was discovered in January 2026 and predates the earlier oldest cave painting, found in the Maltravieso cave, by at least 1,100 years.
Several groups of scientists suggest the oldest cave paintings were created not by Homo sapiens but by Denisovans and Neanderthals. A 2018 study dated three red non-figurative symbols in the Spanish caves of Maltravieso, Ardales, and La Pasiega to 64,000 years, predating modern humans in Europe by at least 20,000 years, so they must have been made by Neanderthals.
The most common subjects in cave paintings are large wild animals such as bison, horses, aurochs, and deer, along with tracings of human hands and abstract patterns called finger flutings. Drawings of humans were rare and usually schematic, and plants account for less than one percent of symbols in European cave art.
Cave artists used red and yellow ochre, hematite, manganese oxide, and charcoal as pigments. Their techniques included finger tracing, modeling in clay, engravings, bas-relief sculpture, hand stencils, and paintings done in two or three colors.
Early scholars such as Salomon Reinach and Henri Breuil interpreted the paintings as utilitarian hunting magic to increase the abundance of prey. David Lewis-Williams later proposed they were made by paleolithic shamans painting visions from a trance state, while a 2022 analysis led by Bennett Bacon suggested lines and dots tracked animal mating cycles in a lunar calendar.
Cave paintings are dated by sampling the pigment itself, torch marks on the walls, or the carbonate deposits that form over the paintings. Subject matter can also indicate chronology, and the Cave of El Castillo in Spain was dated to at least 40,000 BC using uranium-thorium dating in a 2012 study.
Cave paintings are found across Europe, Asia, Africa, Australia, and the Americas. Nearly 350 caves with prehistoric art exist in France and Spain, with other major sites including Tassili n'Ajjer in Algeria, Laas Geel in Somaliland, the Apollo 11 Cave in Namibia, Serra da Capivara in Brazil, and Cueva de las Manos in Argentina.