In archaeology, 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. Some of these paintings may not have been created by Homo sapiens.
Discussion around prehistoric art is important in understanding the history of Homo sapiens and how human beings have come to have unique abstract thoughts. Some point to these prehistoric paintings as possible examples of creativity, spirituality, and sentimental thinking in prehistoric humans.
Dating
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 produce misleading results if contaminated by other samples, 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, or the formation of carbonate deposits on top of the paintings. 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 claimed cave painting is from Liang Metanduno on Muna Island, a handprint dated at least 67,800 years old. This painting predates by at least 1,100 years a cave painting previously thought to be the oldest, found in the Maltravieso cave, which has been suggested to have been made by a Neanderthal based on its age. "we present dating results for three sites in Spain that show that cave art emerged in Iberia substantially earlier than previously thought. Uranium-thorium (U-Th) dates on carbonate crusts overlying paintings provide minimum ages for a red linear motif in La Pasiega (Cantabria), a hand stencil in Maltravieso (Extremadura), and red-painted speleothems in Ardales (Andalucía). Collectively, these results show that cave art in Iberia is older than 64.8 thousand years (ka). This cave art is the earliest dated so far and predates, by at least 20 ka, the arrival of modern humans in Europe, which implies Neandertal authorship." The oldest date given to a figurative cave painting is a depiction of several human figures hunting pigs in the caves in the Maros-Pangkep karst of South Sulawesi, Indonesia, in 2019 dated to be over 43,900 years old. Before that finding, the oldest known figurative cave paintings were that of a bull dated to 40,000 years, at Lubang Jeriji Saléh cave, East Kalimantan, Indonesian Borneo, and a depiction of a pig with a minimum age of 35,400 years at Timpuseng cave in Sulawesi."using uranium-series dating of coralloid speleothems directly associated with 12 human hand stencils and two figurative animal depictions from seven cave sites in the Maros karsts of Sulawesi, we show that rock art traditions on this Indonesian island are at least compatible in age with the oldest European art. The earliest dated image from Maros, with a minimum age of 39.9 kyr, is now the oldest known hand stencil in the world. In addition, a painting of a babirusa ('pig-deer') made at least 35.4 kyr ago is among the earliest dated figurative depictions worldwide, if not the earliest one. Among the implications, it can now be demonstrated that humans were producing rock art by ~40 kyr ago at opposite ends of the Pleistocene Eurasian world." The oldest rock painting is however not found in a cave but was found in a South African excavation site. The hand-drawn lines on the small piece of rock are dating back 73,000 years.
However, all these age estimates, which are based on uranium-lead dating, have been contested, because they do not account for the potential for leaching of uranium, which if not accounted for would artificially skew the date for the cave paintings too old.Sauvet G. Uranium-thorium dating: the race towards the earliest rock art. AOJ Hist Archaeol Anthropol Explor. 2026;2(1):13–15.
The earliest known European figurative cave paintings are those of the Cave of El Castillo in Spain, which a 2012 study using uranium-thorium dated back to at least 40,000 BC.. "We present uranium-series disequilibrium dates of calcite deposits overlying or underlying art found in 11 caves, including the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) World Heritage sites of Altamira, El Castillo, and Tito Bustillo, Spain. The results demonstrate that the tradition of decorating caves extends back at least to the Early Aurignacian period, with minimum ages of 40.8 thousand years for a red disk, 37.3 thousand years for a hand stencil, and 35.6 thousand years for a claviform-like symbol. These minimum ages reveal either that cave art was a part of the cultural repertoire of the first anatomically modern humans in Europe or that perhaps Neanderthals also engaged in painting caves." The El Castillo red stippled disk (sample O-83) was dated to (95% CI, corrected). Table 1: Ages are corrected for detritus by using an assumed 232Th/238U activity of and 230Th/238U and 234U/238U at equilibrium. See also: Prior to this announcement, it was believed that the oldest figurative cave paintings were those of the Chauvet Cave in France, dating to earlier than 30,000 BC in the Upper Paleolithic according to radiocarbon dating. Some researchers believe the drawings are too advanced for this era and question this age. 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.
In 2009, cavers discovered drawings in Coliboaia Cave in Romania, stylistically comparable to those at Chauvet. An initial dating puts the age of an image in the same range as Chauvet: about 32,000 years old.
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. 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.
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 BC) and Altamira in Spain died out about 10,000BC, coinciding with the advent of the Neolithic period. Some caves probably continued to be painted over a period of several thousands of years.
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. Over a long period of time, the cave art has become less naturalistic and has graduated from beautiful, naturalistic animal drawings to simple ones, and then to abstract shapes.
Subjects, themes, and patterns in cave painting
Cave artists used a variety of techniques such as finger tracing, modeling in clay, engravings, bas-relief sculpture, hand stencils, and paintings done in two or three colors. Scholars classify cave art as "Signs" or abstract marks. 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. Images of vegetation were also rare as plants account for less than 1% of symbols depicted in European cave art. This is peculiar to scientists as the majority of Earth’s biomass is plants. These artists would have used plants for food, medicine, and shelter yet it remains under represented.
A 2012 study found that prehistoric cave artists depicted the walking gait of four-legged animals with greater accuracy than modern artists, suggesting close observation of prey animals was important for survival. Kieran D. O'Hara, geologist, suggests in his book Cave Art and Climate Change that climate controlled the themes depicted. 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 with a few incomplete exceptions have no real equivalent in Paleolithic cave paintings. One counterexample is a feminine figure in the Chauvet Cave, as described in an interview with Dominique Baffier in Cave of Forgotten Dreams.Herzog, Werner. (2010). "Cave of Forgotten Dreams". 43:25.
Hand stencils, formed by placing a hand against the wall and covering the surrounding area in pigment result in the characteristic image of a roughly round area of solid pigment with the negative shape of the hand in the centre, these may then be decorated with dots, dashes, and patterns. Often, these are 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, Australia, and South America. One site in Baja California features handprints as a prominent motif in its rock art. Archaeological study of this site revealed that, based on the size of the handprints, they most likely belonged to the women of the community. In addition to this, they were likely used during initiation rituals in Chinigchinich religious practices, which were commonly practiced in the Luiseño territory where this site is located.
Theories and interpretations
In the early 20th century, following the work of Walter Baldwin Spencer and Francis James Gillen, scholars such as Salomon Reinach, Henri Breuil and interpreted the paintings as 'utilitarian' hunting magic to increase the abundance of prey. Jacob Bronowski states, "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."