Cave painting

• 1. Introduction

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  A handprint pressed onto a cave wall on Muna Island has been dated to at least 67,800 years old. As of January 2026 it is the oldest known cave painting in the world. No name, no signature, just the negative shape of a hand left in pigment tens of thousands of years before anyone wrote anything down. Cave paintings are a type of parietal art, found on the walls or ceilings of caves, and the term usually implies prehistoric origin. Nearly 350 caves containing such prehistoric art have been found in France and Spain alone. Yet the most basic questions remain open. Who actually held the spraying pipe and the ochre? Several groups of scientists suggest the oldest of these paintings were not made by Homo sapiens at all, but by Denisovans and Neanderthals. Why did artists paint bison, horses, and human hands, while plants account for less than one percent of the symbols in European cave art? And what were these images for, if anything? Some see in them the first evidence of creativity, spirituality, and sentimental thinking in prehistoric humans. The walls have kept their secrets well.

• 2. Reading The Walls' Age

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  Radiocarbon dating, scientists found, can produce misleading results if a sample is contaminated by other material. Caves and rocky overhangs are typically littered with debris from many different periods, which made the age of these paintings a contentious issue from the start. Later technology let researchers sample the pigment itself, the torch marks on the walls, or the carbonate deposits that form on top of a painting. Subject matter offers another clock; the reindeer depicted in the Spanish cave of Cueva de las Monedas place those drawings in the last Ice Age. The Chauvet Cave in France shows how messy the picture can get. More than 80 radiocarbon dates had been obtained there by 2011, drawn from torch marks, the paintings, animal bones, and charcoal on the cave floor. They revealed two periods of creation, one around 35,000 years ago and one around 30,000 years ago. Many of the paintings, it turned out, had been modified repeatedly over thousands of years. That discovery may explain a long-standing confusion, where finer paintings seemed to predate cruder ones; some researchers had even argued the drawings were too advanced for their era. The 2012 uranium-thorium study of the Cave of El Castillo in Spain pushed the earliest known European figurative cave paintings back to at least 40,000 BC. In Australia, Nawarla Gabarnmang holds charcoal drawings radiocarbon-dated to 28,000 years, the oldest site on that continent for which reliable date evidence exists.

• 3. The Contest For Oldest

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  Lubang Jeriji Saléh, a cave on Indonesian Borneo in East Kalimantan, held the record for a time with a bull dated to 40,000 years. In November 2018 scientists reported a depiction there of an unknown animal, over 40,000 and perhaps as old as 52,000 years. The title kept moving. In December 2019, cave paintings of pig hunting in the Maros-Pangkep karst of South Sulawesi were dated to over 43,900 years, and later to at least 51,200 years. That finding was recognized as "the oldest known depiction of storytelling and the earliest instance of figurative art in human history." On the 3rd of July 2024, the journal Nature published research on paintings at Leang Karampuang showing anthropomorphic figures interacting with a pig, measuring 36 by 15 in and dated to roughly 51,200 years old. A 2018 study claimed an even older age of 64,000 years for non-figurative art in the Iberian Peninsula. Three red non-figurative symbols in the Spanish caves of Maltravieso, Ardales, and La Pasiega predate the appearance of modern humans in Europe by at least 20,000 years. By that logic they must have been made by Neanderthals. The oldest rock painting of all sits outside any cave. At Blombos Cave, about 300 km east of Cape Town, archaeologists found a small rock fragment among spear points in 2011. After seven years of testing, the hand-drawn lines, made from an ochre crayon, were dated back 73,000 years.

• 4. What They Chose To Paint

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  Bison, horses, aurochs, and deer dominate the walls, alongside tracings of human hands and abstract patterns called finger flutings. The painters of Lascaux left mainly reindeer bones behind, yet reindeer do not appear at all in the cave paintings there, where equine species are the most common. The species depicted were suitable for human hunting, but were not necessarily the actual typical prey found in the bone deposits. Drawings of humans were rare and usually schematic, far less detailed than the naturalistic animals. Plants are stranger still in their absence, accounting for less than one percent of symbols in European cave art, even though plants make up the majority of Earth's biomass and supplied food, medicine, and shelter. Cave artists worked with finger tracing, modeling in clay, engravings, bas-relief sculpture, hand stencils, and paintings done in two or three colors. Their pigments were red and yellow ochre, hematite, manganese oxide, and charcoal. A 2012 study found these prehistoric artists depicted the walking gait of four-legged animals more accurately than modern artists do, a sign that close observation of prey mattered for survival. The geologist Kieran D. O'Hara, in his book Cave Art and Climate Change, suggests climate controlled the themes. One feminine figure in the Chauvet Cave stands as a rare counterexample to the rule that the Venus figurines carved in bone and ivory have no real equivalent on cave walls; it was described in an interview with Dominique Baffier in Cave of Forgotten Dreams.

• 5. The Mark Of A Hand

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  A hand pressed flat against the wall, the surrounding area covered in pigment, leaves a negative shape at the center, sometimes decorated afterward with dots, dashes, and patterns. Some walls carry many such stencils. A number of hands show a finger wholly or partly missing, and several explanations have been offered. These images appear in similar forms across Europe, Eastern Asia, Australia, and South America. Dean Snow of Pennsylvania State University analyzed hand prints and stencils in French and Spanish caves and proposed that a proportion of them, including those around the spotted horses in Pech Merle, were of female hands. One site in Baja California makes handprints its most prominent motif. Study of the handprint sizes there suggested they most likely belonged to the women of the community, and that they were used during initiation rituals in Chinigchinich religious practices common in the surrounding Luiseño territory. At Cueva de las Manos in Santa Cruz, Argentina, the hands are mostly stencilled negatives, and most are "left hands" with the thumb on the right. That pattern has been used to argue the painters held the spraying pipe in their right hand. The negative hand impressions there date to around 550 BC; the positive impressions to 180 BC.

• 6. Theories Of Why

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  Hunting magic was the early answer. Following the work of Walter Baldwin Spencer and Francis James Gillen, scholars such as Salomon Reinach and Henri Breuil read the paintings as utilitarian, made to increase the abundance of prey. Jacob Bronowski offered a different reading: "I think that the power that we see expressed here for the first time is the power of anticipation: the forward-looking imagination. In these paintings the hunter was made familiar with dangers which he knew he had to face but to which he had not yet come." David Lewis-Williams, drawing on ethnographic studies of contemporary hunter-gatherer societies, argued the paintings were made by paleolithic shamans. A shaman would retreat into the darkness, enter a trance, then paint the images of their visions, perhaps to draw power out of the cave walls themselves. R. Dale Guthrie, having studied both highly artistic and lower-quality work, found a wide range of skill and age among the artists. He hypothesized that the main themes, powerful beasts, risky hunting scenes, and nude women, were the work of adolescent males. A 2022 analysis led by the amateur archaeologist Bennett Bacon, with a team at the University of Durham including Paul Pettitt and Robert William Kentridge, went further. They suggested that lines, dots, and a curious "Y" symbol, proposed to mean "to give birth," correlated with the mating cycle of animals in a lunar calendar. If so, these could be the earliest known evidence of a proto-writing system.

• 7. Painted Across The World

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  Marcelino Sanz de Sautuola first encountered the Magdalenian paintings of the Cave of Altamira in Cantabria, Spain in 1879, and the academics of the time dismissed them as hoaxes. Later reappraisals and many further discoveries proved them genuine. The Magdalenian style seen at Lascaux, dated around 15,000 BC, and at Altamira died out about 10,000 BC, as the Neolithic period began. The rock art that followed in the Iberian Mediterranean Basin looked nothing like it, favoring large assemblies of smaller, less detailed figures with at least as many humans as animals. Far from Europe, the record stretches in every direction. The Khoit Tsenkher Cave in Mongolia carries stags, oxen, lions, camels, elephants, and ostriches painted from the walls to the ceiling. The Padah-Lin Caves of Burma hold 11,000-year-old paintings. The Apollo 11 Cave in Namibia is dated to roughly 25,500 to 27,500 years ago. In 2002 a French archaeological team discovered the Laas Geel paintings near Hargeisa in Somaliland, dating back around 5,000 years and depicting wild animals and decorated cows. In Algeria, the Tassili n'Ajjer mountains, first explored for this art in 1933, have yielded 15,000 engravings and drawings recording animal migrations and climatic shifts from 6000 BC to the late classical period. At uKhahlamba / Drakensberg Park in South Africa, the San people who settled the area some 8,000 years ago left paintings now thought to be about 3,000 years old. In the Americas, Serra da Capivara National Park in Piauí, Brazil became a World Heritage Site in 1991, and the Chumash people of Southern and Baja California painted Swordfish Cave, named for the swordfish on its walls. Cave art 6,000 years old has been found in the Cumberland Plateau region of Tennessee. The Kapova Cave in Bashkortostan, Russia, around 18,000 years old, was the first cave paintings publicized outside Western Europe; the Ignatievka Cave in the Ural Mountains, holding a mammoth and 160 other images, is supposed to be the northernmost Paleolithic site of all.