Cave Painting

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CONTENTS

• What is Cave Painting?
• What are the 3 Main Types?
• When Did Cave Painting Start?
• Where are Most Caves Located?
• Who Were the First Cave Painters?
• 3 Main Themes of Cave Painting
• How Paintings Were Made
• Painting Techniques
• What Pigments Were Used?
• Most Famous Cave Paintings
• What's the Meaning of Cave Painting?
• Why is it Important?
• When Did it End?
• References

What is Cave Painting?

Cave painting is a form of prehistoric art involving the application of colour pigments to the walls, floors or ceilings of underground rock shelters.

Like all Stone Age painting, it is essentially hunter-gatherer art, created by semi-nomadic humans.

What's the Difference Between Cave Painting, Drawing and Engraving?

The difference between these three forms of parietal art becomes clear once we understand the three basic stages of producing a picture of (say), a horse.

• First, the outline and basic features of the horse are drawn on the cave wall. This is done by scratching the surface of the rock with a sharp flint or other tool, or by applying a black outline - typically drawn with manganese pigment or a piece of charcoal.
• Next, the finished outline of the animal, or its body, may be painted - meaning, filled-in with one or more pigments. At Lascaux, for instance, the manes and hooves of the third Chinese horse are painted black, while the upper body is red/orange and the lower body left unpainted.
• Lastly, the edges and contours of the completed animal may be shaded with black (or another) pigment to give it a 3-D appearance.

An animal picture which has an outline but no in-fill is usually referred to as a drawing. If part (or all) of the picture outline is filled in with pigment (which is usually the case), it's a painting. And an engraving is any picture whose outline is scratched or incised into the rock surface, regardless of whether it is painted or not.

What are the 3 Main Types of Cave Painting?

Cave paintings are either monochrome, polychrome, or engraved and painted.

Monochrome
These paintings are made with a single colour (most often, black). Some only have outlines, with no in-fill, but most have some sort of in-fill.

The animal paintings at Chauvet, for instance, are mostly monochrome but most appear to have some form of black colouring: horses in particular have coloured manes.

Hence the Chauvet pictures are usually described as black paintings, not drawings. Other examples can be seen at Niaux Cave.

Polychrome
These are created with two or more colours, typically black and differing shades of red, or more rarely, violet.

The finest multi-coloured cave paintings can be found at Lascaux (Dordogne) and Altamira (Cantabria).

Engraved and Painted
This rarer type of painting typically involves incising a preliminary outline in the rock, which is then over-painted with pigment. Typically the body of the picture, or part of it, is also filled-in with pigment, but not always.

Examples of this combined method can be seen at Cosquer Cave (Marseille), Font-de-Gaume (Périgord), Atxurra (Basque Country), and Candamo de la Pena (Asturias).

When Did Cave Painting Start?

First Use of Pigments

Archaeological evidence from Africa shows that use of ochre pigments by early humans can be traced back to the Middle Stone Age, around 500,000 BC.

This evidence comes from several South African sites of the Late Acheulean culture, such as Kathu Pan 1, Canteen Kopje, and Wonderwerk Cave (Watts et al., 2016).

Similar traces are known from sites in Kenya (Brooks, 2011), Zambia (Barham, 2002) and Ethiopia (Chavaillon & Berthelet, 2004).

One of the most complete ochre 'tookits' was found at Blombos Cave in South Africa, where archaeologists recovered more than 8,000 pieces of ochre, dating to between 75,000-100,000 BC, many of which had been fashioned into crayons.

This evidence shows that humans were becoming increasingly familiar with pigments from a relatively early date.

BUT, none of this necessarily involves cave painting.

This is because ochre was used for a variety of purposes, the most common being protection against the sun.

It was also widely used in face and body painting, and in the decoration of personal objects, as at Krapina (Croatia) and the Cave of Los Aviones (Spain).

For information about dating techniques applicable to cave paintings and drawings, see: Dating Methods in Archaeology.

Oldest Known Cave Painting

• The world's oldest known cave paintings were created in Spain. A hand stencil in the Cave of Maltravieso (Extremadura) was dated to at least 64,700 BC.
• The earliest known cave painting of an abstract sign is the scalariform in the Cave of La Pasiega in Cantabria, which was dated to 62,000 BC.
• The oldest known animal pictures are the Sulawesi paintings of warty pigs in the Leang Tedongnge Cave, at Maros-Pangkep, which are dated to 43,500 BC.
• The oldest cave painting of a human figure is the half-human, half-animal figure found in the Fumane Cave, Verona, in northern Italy. This is dated to 34,500 BC.

For more about the origins of painting, see: World's Oldest Art.

Note: Numerous caves contain evidence of several periods of activity, sometimes separated by thousands of years.

The famous Spanish cave of Altamira, for instance, was decorated over a span of 21,000 years, from roughly 34,000 to 13,000 BC.

Its oldest art (a red claviform symbol) was created no later than 34,160 BC. A second period of activity around 20,000 BC, saw horses painted on the ceiling of the Chamber of Frescoes. Finally, a third period of activity culminated in the cave's most famous animal paintings - the multi-coloured bison - between 15,000 and 13,000 BC.

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Where are Most Caves Located?

Most decorated caves we know about are located in Europe, notably in France and Spain. The most spectacular cave art is found in the region of Franco-Cantabrian art - namely, the Dordogne/Lot region, the Ardèche, the foothills of the French Pyrénées, Cantabria, the Asturias and the Basque Country.

This spatial distribution is due mainly to historical events. Europe was severely impacted by the Ice Age, and the Franco-Cantabrian region was a refuge for northern immigrants fleeing the cold.

This influx of population had a significant impact on the Stone Age culture of the region, including the production of cave art.

However, there are also more modern reasons why Western Europe has more cave art.

First, the area has a relatively high population density, so discoveries occur quite regularly.

Second, it's a wealthy region, better able than most to finance excavations and dating tests.

Third, cave location is also determined by geology, with most caves occuring in limestone or dolomite rock. Thus the famous paleolithic Indonesian caves in Sulawesi and East Kalimantan are located in limestone karsts that are riddled with cavities.

In general, instances of paintings in deep caves outside Europe are rare, except for SE Asia. They are seen in the Americas (mesoamerican Maya caves in Mexico, as well as mud-glyph caves in the southeastern United States, or Cueva de las Manos in Argentina), but most of these examples date to much more recent times.

A few deep caves have been found in Australia (Koonalda Cave, Nullarbor Plain), but most aboriginal rock art is found in the open, or in shallow shelters (like Nawarla Gabarnmang) or on rocks, is extremely abundant all over the world and generally belongs to much later times.

Africa remains an enigma. After all, we know that cave art (engravings) was being created by modern humans in southern Africa tens of thousands of years ahead of anyone else.

The continent is home to more than 14,000 recorded - but as yet unexplored - Stone Age sites in sub-Saharan Africa alone.

Yet the oldest known animal paintings in Africa - found at Apollo 11 Cave in Namibia - were dated only to 25,500 BC.

If moderns migrating out of Africa were producing beautiful cave paintings in Indonesia no later than 43,500 BC, why weren't African artists producing similar works at the same time, if not earlier?

The obvious answer is, they were, but we haven't found them yet.

Who were the First Cave Painters?

Until quite recently, cave painting was believed to have started in Europe, for the simple reason that all the oldest and most important sites of paleolithic art (Altamira, Lascaux, Font de Gaume, Niaux, Les Trois Frères and Les Combarelles) were located in France and Spain.

What's more, very few paintings were dated directly, Instead, the pictures were dated by comparative analysis with pictures in other caves.

Lastly, due to lack of knowledge, the main period of cave painting was thought to have occurred around 13,000 BC, during the Magdalenian period (15,000-10,000 BC).

So who painted the first pictures? Well, there were two candidates: Neanderthals, who had been resident in Europe since about 500,000 BC, and modern humans, who began arriving in Europe from Africa about 40,000 BC.

(Note: Modern humans are the latest variant of Homo sapiens, the most recent species of human being - the one we belong to. They appeared about 160,000 BC in East Africa, and began migrating out of Africa about 100,000 BC. The largest wave of modern migrants left Africa about 70,000 BC.)

As it was, within 10,000 years of their arrival in Europe, the moderns totally displaced the Neanderthals, who vanished completely from the archaeological record.

As a result, most archaeologists assumed that the first cave painters were modern humans.

But recent discoveries have muddied the waters.

First, Chauvet Cave was discovered. The unusually sophisticated animal pictures at Chauvet - dating to the Aurignacian period (40,000-30,000 BC) around 34,500 BC - showed that humans had been painting quality pictures far longer than previously thought.

Second, archaeologists using new dating methods (Uranium/Thorium dating technology) discovered that several Spanish caves contained paintings dating as far back as 64,700 BC - twenty thousand years before the arrival of modern man.

Third, more dating tests confirmed suspicions raised at Chauvet and showed that humans had begun decorating caves much earlier than previously expected.

Paintings in the limestone caves of Maros-Pangkep, a remote area in southwest Sulawesi, and in caves on the Sangkulirang-Mangkalihat Peninsula in East Kalimantan, were found to be older than any figurative paintings discovered to date.

Conclusion: (1) Neanderthals were likely the first cave painters. (2) Moderns were the first humans to paint animals, only not in Europe but in SE Asia.

Note: Neanderthal involvement in cave painting is supported by their sporadic use of ochre, the most reliable evidence of which comes from Maastricht-Belvédère in the Netherlands, dating to between 250,000 and 200,000 years BC (Roebroeks, 1988; Roebroeks et al. 2012).

Following this, however, no significant trace of ochre use in Europe was found for another 100,000 years. Indeed, not until about 60,000 BC do we see any substantial evidence of Neanderthals using pigment.

For more about the chronology of cave painting, see: Prehistoric Art Timeline (from 540,000 BC).

3 Main Themes of Cave Painting

Stone Age cave painting follows a fairly static iconography, and has a very narrow focus in terms of thematic content.

For example, Stone Age pictures contain no landscape (no pictures of streams, rivers, cliffs etc.), no scenes of everyday life (no hunting or campfire scenes) and no pictures of the settlements in which most people lived.

Instead, as Jean Clottes - one of France's leading prehistorians - has noted: the main types or themes of cave painting can be summarized in one sentence: "big animals, few humans, and many geometric signs".

Above all, paleolithic art is the art of animals. It's true that animal pictures are outnumbered more than 2:1 by abstract symbols (lines, dots, tectiforms, circles, half-circles, triangles, and the like), but animal pictures are without question the most powerful visual imagery of the Ice Age.

Some of the paintings of the great black bulls at Lascaux exceed 5 metres in length.

Curiously, paintings of humans are extremely scarce.

This iconographic scheme of cave painting is seen throughout Europe, from Altamira in the west, through to Coliboaia Cave (Romania) in the centre, and as far as Kapova Cave in the Urals, in the extreme east.

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Animals

Animals constituted the main visual theme of cave painting. Typical characteristics of animal pictures are as follows:

• Animals are painted in a naturalistic style.
• They are drawn in profile.
• They are depicted as adults.
• They may be drawn in their entirety or else indicated by their heads, legs or other parts.
• Animals are usually depicted on their own, rather than in groups or herds, although some famous groupings do exist, such the lions and rhinos at Chauvet.
• There are no painted images of mating scenes, although pregnancy is seen: examples include the pregnant horse at Lascaux, and the pregnant mare at La Pileta.
• Animals painted include: horses, bison, reindeer, stags, aurochs, cattle, mammoths, ibex, rhinos, lions and cave bears, as well as rare examples of musk ox, ass, saiga, chamois, wolf, fox, hare, otter, weasel, hyena, seals, fish, reptiles, birds and other creatures.
• The most common animal to appear on cave walls is the horse. At Lascaux, for instance, 60 percent of animal pictures are horses. Occasionally, horses are outnumbered by bison (Altamira, Font-de-Gaume) or reindeer (La Pasiega), more rarely by rhinos and lions (Chauvet) or, by mammoths (Rouffignac). But in general, horses predominate, despite being a less common food source than either bison or reindeer.
• Aurignacian artists (such as those at Chauvet and Coliboaia Cave) tended to paint animals they feared, a tendency which changed at the start of the Gravettian period, when animals hunted for food became the favourite theme.
• Fish are rarely seen in paleoart: two exceptions being the halibut drawing at La Pileta and the pictures of pike in Grande Grotte at Arcy-sur-Cure.
• There are also some rare examples of fantasy creatures, such as the two-horned 'unicorn' at Lascaux.

Anthropomorphs

The 'human' theme is handled quite differently from that of animals.

• Paintings of anthropomorphic figures are exceptionally rare: less than one hundred are known.
• Many human figures are depicted in a non-naturalistic style (often, as stick-like figures).
• Drawings of entire human figures are especially rare (less than 20), and most are engraved not painted.
• No attempt at painting a regular 'portrait' of a human figure is known. By contrast, see the Dolní Vestonice Portrait Head (25,000 BC), the world's oldest portrait bust, now in the Brno Museum, Czech Rep.
• Notable examples of human-like figures include the dead man at Lascaux, the part-human part-animal figure in the Cul-de-Four at Niaux, a shaman-like figure wearing a mask with horns at Fumane, and the eerie dancers in Addaura Cave. There are several other famous drawings of humans, such as the 'sorcerer' figures at Les Trois Frères and Gabillou, but these are engraved not painted.

Geometric Signs

Ideomorphs constitute the strangest and least comprehensible theme in cave art. Numerically, abstract signs are the most common type of painted imagery in paleolithic shelters.

That said, only 32 sign types are seen during the period of Upper Paleolithic art (40,000-10,000 BC).

The most common of these include: Line signs (drawn with a single stroke), Dot signs (points, disks, or blobs), Open-angles (like a horizontal V-sign), Ovals (elongated sphere), and Triangles (regular geometric symbol).

More complex motifs include: Aviforms (Placard-type signs), Flabelliforms, (fan-shaped signs), Penniforms (feather-shaped signs), and Spanish Tectiforms (big rectangular tectiforms).

These geometric signs appear in almost every known cave in Europe, and their appearance supports the idea that modern man arrived in Europe already capable of symbolic thought.

This is because 66 percent of all signs were in use by 30,000 BC. In other words, they were not invented, tried out and developed after moderns arrived in Europe - they were already part of modern man's cognitive 'toolbox'.

Cave signs are frequently seen on or next to pictures of animals, and even humans. Examples include:

• The W-sign in the frieze of the red rhinoceroses at Chauvet Cave.
• The red dots and hand stencils on the panel of spotted horses at Pech-Merle Cave.
• The aviform sign above the wounded man, also at Pech-Merle.
• The feathery penniform just above the Chinese horse, as well as the black quadrangle and dots below an Ice Age deer - both at Lascaux.
• The large series of claviform (club) symbols on the pregnant horse at Trois Frères Cave.

Two especially interesting groupings of abstract signs can be seen at two neighbouring caves in Monte Castillo, Cantabria.

• La Pasiega Cave contains a panel of complex Spanish tectiforms, created during the Magdalenian culture, known as 'The Inscription'. Some experts interpret this panel as a rudimentary form of writing.
• El Castillo Cave contains a single panel with a black penniform sign, surrounded by five bell-shaped signs in red. A ledge at the bottom of the panel lends it an altar-like appearance.

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How Were Paintings Located?

How did cave painters decide on a specific location for a painting or drawing? The answer, according to a growing body of research, concerns archaeoacoustics - the relationship between art and sound in Stone Age caves.

For example, at some sites, cave paintings are located at spots with exceptionally strong sound resonance.

Why? In order to enhance the impact of ritual and shamanic ceremony in the caves.

How Paintings Were Made

Typically a paleolithic animal painting was created in four steps, which varied according to the skill and experience of the artist, the contours and nature of the rock surface to be painted, and the raw materials available.

• Preparation
  After choosing an appropriate spot for the painting, the surface of the rock was carefully prepared. Protruding areas were levelled and any natural features that enhanced the picture were improved.
• Outline
  Then the outline and basic features of the animal were drawn on the cave wall, either by scratching the surface of the rock with a sharp tool, or by applying a black outline using charcoal or manganese pigment. Special attention was typically paid to certain outline features of the animal, such as the mane of a horse, the horn of a rhino, or the hair falling from the belly of an ibex or the chest of a bison.
• Colouring
  The finished outline was then filled in with red ochre or some other pigment.
• Shading
  Finally, the edges of the animal's body would be indented with a tool, or shaded with black or another pigment to enhance its volume and increase its three-dimensionality. Paleolithic painters also used foreshortening and chiaroscuro techniques to volumize their figures.

Painting Techniques

• Cave painters used sea-shells and hollowed out bones as paint containers.
• They worked by lamp light, using crude lamps fuelled by animal fat which provided roughly one fifth of the light of a single candle. Sometimes they used torches made of juniper wood.
• At first, they applied the raw pigment with their fingers, or else with some type of a pad, made out of moss or lichen.
• Later, they progressed to paint brushes made from animal hair, or 'crayons' made from solid lumps of pigment.
• In the end, they adopted sophisticated spray-painting techniques using hollowed-out animal bones or reeds, through which they blew pigment onto the rock surface. A hollowed out bone of a bird, stained with red ochre, dating to 16,000 BC, was unearthed at Altamira cave, showing that cave artists must have been proficient at spray-painting by this date.
• Each era introduced new painting methods, thus caves decorated over many generations exhibit numerous styles.

How Painting Developed

During the Upper Paleolithic we see at least three phases of cave painting.

Lower Aurignacian Phase

During this period, engravings are drawn with the finger on soft clay walls. They consist of simple spirals and frets, or crude representations of animals.

There are paintings of animals, with crude contours drawn in black, yellow or red. Also we see stencilled silhouettes of human hands, produced by laying the hand on the wall and blowing colour over it.

Upper Aurignacian Phase

During this period, engravings, paintings and charcoal drawings of animals are rendered with great accuracy. Colours used are typically red and black, and the most essential anatomical details are reproduced as well as the contours.

Lower Magdalenian Phase

Engravings and paintings reach their apogee. Artists master details as well as proportions. In the engravings, spaces are often reproduced by hatching. Black paintings are partially filled in with brown or red, and there is an expert use of shading. New colours (e.g. purple) appear, while artists show great skill in capturing the essence of an animal - a mammoth, a horse, or a weasel - with a minimum number of brushstrokes.

What Pigments Were Used?

• In the beginning, cave painters used pigments made from animal and vegetable sources, which had only a short life. This was probably a hangover from face and body painting.
• However, by the Gravettian period, about 26,000 BC, nearly all cave painting was done using mineral-based materials which didn't fade.
• Most colour pigments were sourced locally, mostly from mineral sources found in the earth. The most important of these was ochre (iron oxide mixed with varying amounts of sand and clay). This provided a range of colours, from yellow to deep orange, red, and brown. For their black colours, artists used either manganese dioxide or charcoal.
• After grinding their pigments to a fine powder, painters mixed the powder with water, animal fat, vegetable juice, blood or urine to help it adhere to the rock surface. As well as these binders, they also employed extenders to improve paint texture, flow and durability. They used biotite and feldspar, or calcium phosphate from crushed animal bone.

For more about the type of colour pigments used in cave paintings during the Paleolithic, see Stone Age Colour Palette.

Most Famous Cave Paintings

Here is a short selection of the best known caves, the date of their oldest works, and the paintings or painted panels for which they are famous. For more details, see: 80 Paleolithic Caves.

France

Chauvet Cave
34,500 BC
'Dotted Animal Panel'
'Panel of the Sacred Heart'
'Panel of the Fighting Rhinos and Horses'
'Panel of the Megaloceros'
'Panel of the Rhinoceroses'
'Great Panel of the Lions'
For more details, see: Chauvet Cave Paintings.

Cosquer Cave
25,000 BC
Famous for its hand stencils and its highly unusual images of marine life, such as seals, fish, seabirds, jellyfish, penguins and squid.

Cougnac Cave
23,000 BC
Famous for its beautiful image of a long-haired ibex, as well as two pictures of wounded men - one with three spears sticking in him, the other with seven. Also contains a number of strange aviform signs.

Font-de-Gaume
14,000 BC
Second only to Lascaux as a centre of Magdalenian painting in France. Noted for 'The Licking Reindeer', 'The Leaping Horse' and the 'Bison frieze'.

Gargas
25,000 BC
Famous for its huge collection of hand stencils, in red and black, many seemingly deformed.

Grande Grotte Arcy-sur-Cure
26,700 BC
Famous for its paintings of dangerous animals like mammoths, rhinos, bears and lions. Also noted for its giant Megaloceros, and several rare pictures of fish (especially pike). Also contains numerous ideomorphs, including trapezoidal figures akin to 'Spanish tectiforms'.

Lascaux Cave
19,000 BC
'Hall of the Bulls'
'Great Black Bull'
'Three Chinese Horses'
'The Falling Cow'
'Upside-Down Horse'
'Shaft of the Dead Man'
'Great Black Cow'
'Crossed Bison'
'Niche of the Felines'
For more details, see: Lascaux Cave Paintings.

Niaux Cave
13,000 BC
Famous for its black paintings, and unique weasel drawing.

Pech-Merle Cave
27,000 BC
Famous for its 'Spotted Horses of Pech-Merle', the 'Black Frieze of bison and horses', and the 'Wounded Man' bracketed by Placard-type aviforms. Abbé Breuil christened Pech Merle the 'Sistine Chapel of the Lot'.

Rouffignac
11,000 BC
Dubbed the 'cave of the hundred mammoths', it is famous for its magnificent ceiling ('Le Grand Plafond de Rouffignac') decorated with a swirling assemblage of 60 large black drawings of horses, mammoths, ibex and bison. Also noted for a strange black drawing of a bearded human face.

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Spain

Altamira Cave
34,000 BC
Altamira is the centre of paleolithic art in Spain. It is best known for its multi-coloured bison on the low ceiling in the Sala de los Frescos.

Altxerri Cave
37,000 BC
Contains Europe's oldest animal paintings, nearly 60 percent of which are bison.

Ardales Cave
63,000 BC
Its most famous animal painting is the Great Black Deer (Gran Cierva en Negro).

Ekain Cave
12,000 BC
Best known for its 'Great Panel of Horses' which was described by André Leroi-Gourhan as "the most perfect group of horses in Quaternary art".

La Pasiega
62,000 BC
Contains more cave art than any site in Spain. It has more than 280 animal paintings and a host of pictographs, which include: dotted signs, linear signs, claviforms and 'Spanish tectiforms' such as those on the famous panel known as 'The Inscription'.

La Pileta
18,000 BC
La Pileta also contains a mass of abstract signs as well as animal paintings (horses, goats, bulls and ibexes) painted in yellow, orange, red, white and black. Highlights include a drawing of a giant halibut as well as a pregnant mare decorated with red dots.

Tito Bustillo
34,000 BC
Best-known for its red and black paintings of horses, notably those in the "Galeria de los Caballos", and its unusual use of red and dark violet colour pigments. Its oldest painting is a human-like figure in red ochre.

Rest of the World

Addaura Caves
10,000 BC
Famous for its ritualistic scene involving over a dozen human figures dancing around a single victim.

Coliboaia Cave
30,000 BC
Painting highlights at Coliboaia include eight charcoal drawings executed in a style very similar to that used at Chauvet.

Cueva de las Manos
7,300 BC
Rock shelter in a remote Patagonian canyon famous for its hand stencils and other handprints.

East Kalimantan Caves
38,000 BC
The Lubang Jeriji Saleh Cave is world famous for its 2-metre long painting of a wounded wild cow.

Fumane Cave
34,500 BC
Famous for its red ochre wall paintings, featuring an animal with a long neck (a weasel?), a strange five-legged creature, and a human-like figure - known as 'The Shaman' - wearing a mask with horns.

Kapova Cave
14,500 BC
Famous for its red ochre paintings of mammoths and horses - the oldest cave paintings in Russia.

Nawarla Gabarnmang
26,000 BC
This rock shelter contains the oldest carbon dated painting in Australia, namely an abstract crosshatch charcoal drawing.

Sulawesi Caves
43,500 BC
World famous for the red ochre paintings of warty pigs (43,500 BC) in Leang Tedongnge Cave - the oldest figure paintings known to archaeology.

What's the Meaning of Cave Painting?

Why did our ancestors decorate their caves with pictures of animals? What were they trying to say? Answer: we don't know.

To begin with, most anthropologists thought that cave art was simply a pleasant form of interior decoration, created to brighten up living spaces.

Then archaeological evidence began to show that painted caves were not used as general shelters or for housing. Instead, they were sanctuaries inhabited by a select group of artists, shamans and others, who conducted ceremonial activities in the caves.

As a result, scientists now believe that the paintings were created for ceremonial reasons - perhaps connected with social or shamanic rituals.

Whatever the precise reason for cave painting, it was almost certainly driven by an overriding desire to communicate - to communicate with other men, to transmit a vision of the world and to perpetuate a memory.

Why is Cave Art Important?

In a nutshell, cave art (along with body ornamentation and stone tools) constitutes the primary archaeological evidence which is commonly used to differentiate modern human behaviour from that of earlier hominin species. Cave painting was one of the ways by which culture could be maintained across thousands of miles (space) and thousands of years (time).

When Did It End?

Cave painting ended around 10,000 BC, when the ice sheets retreated northwards taking with them the herds of reindeer, upon which Magdalenian society depended.

This led to the destruction of the Magdalenian reindeer habitat, along with its culture and cave art.

As the Paleolithic gave way to the Mesolithic, nomadic hunter-gatherer communities disappeared and were replaced by more static settlements. The great cave sanctuaries were left in silent darkness and ignored over the centuries, except by curious spelunkers and potholers.

References

(1) "Cave Art" Jean Clottes. (2008) Phaidon. ISBN 978-0-7148-5723-7.
(2) "The Cave Painters: Probing the Mysteries of the World's First Artists." Curtis, Gregory (2006). Knopf. ISBN 1-4000-4348-4.
(3) "U-Series Dating of Paleolithic Art in 11 Caves in Spain". Pike, A. W. G. et al. (14 June 2012). Science. 336 (6087): 1409–1413.
(4) "The Dawn of European Art: An Introduction to Palaeolithic Cave Painting." A. Leroi-Gourhan (1982). Cambridge University Press. ISBN-13: 978-0521244596.
(5) "Making the Abstract Concrete: The Place of Geometric Signs in French Upper Paleolithic Parietal Art." (2005) (Thesis) Genevieve von Petzinger. University of Victoria, Canada. (6) "Cave Art and Climate Change." O'Hara, K. (2014). Archway Publishing.