Cave painting
In archaeology, cave paintings are a type of parietal art, found on the wall or ceilings of caves. The term usually implies prehistoric origin. Several groups of scientists suggest that the oldest of such paintings were created not by Homo sapiens, but by Denisovans and Neanderthals.
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 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 known cave painting is from Liang Metanduno on Muna Island, dated at least 67,800 years old. This painting predates earlier oldest cave painting by at least 1,100 years old found in the Maltravieso cave, which was made by a Neanderthal. The oldest date given to an animal cave painting is now a depiction of several human figures hunting pigs in the caves in the Maros-Pangkep karst of South Sulawesi, Indonesia, dated to be over 43,900 years old. Before this, 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.
File:Cueva del Castillo interior.jpg|thumb|left|Inside of the Cave of El Castillo in Puente Viesgo, Cantabria. Dating back to 40,000BC, El Castillo hosts the earliest figurative cave painting in Europe known to date.
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. 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 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 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.
The oldest specimens
The oldest known cave paintings are more than 40,000 years old and found in the caves in the district of Maros. The oldest are often constructed from hand stencils and simple geometric shapes. More recently, in 2021, cave art of a pig found in Sulawesi, Indonesia, and dated to over 45,500 years ago, has been reported.A 2018 study claimed an age of 64,000 years for the oldest examples of non-figurative cave art in the Iberian Peninsula. Represented by three red non-figurative symbols found in the caves of Maltravieso, Ardales and La Pasiega, Spain, these predate the appearance of modern humans in Europe by at least 20,000 years and thus must have been made by Neanderthals rather than modern humans.
In November 2018, scientists reported the discovery of the then-oldest known figurative art painting, over 40,000 years old, of an unknown animal, in the cave of Lubang Jeriji Saléh on the Indonesian island of Borneo. In December 2019, cave paintings portraying pig hunting within the Maros-Pangkep karst region in Sulawesi were discovered to be even older, with an estimated age of at least 51,200 years. This finding was recognized as "the oldest known depiction of storytelling and the earliest instance of figurative art in human history." On July 3, 2024, the journal Nature published research findings indicating that the cave paintings which depict anthropomorphic figures interacting with a pig and measure in Leang Karampuang are approximately 51,200 years old. In January 2026, an older hand stencil was discovered in Muna Island, dated to be at least 67,800 years old, making it the oldest known cave paintings in the world.
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.
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 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.
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."Another theory, developed by David Lewis-Williams and broadly based on ethnographic studies of contemporary hunter-gatherer societies, is that the paintings were made by paleolithic shamans. The shaman would retreat into the darkness of the caves, enter into a trance state, then paint images of their 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 are the work of adolescent males, who constituted a large portion of cave painters, based on surrounding hand print analysis. 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.
Analysis in 2022, led by Bennett Bacon, an amateur archaeologist, along with a team of professional archeologists and psychologists at the University of Durham, including Paul Pettitt and Robert William Kentridge, suggested that lines and dots on upper palaeolithic cave paintings correlated with the mating cycle of animals in a lunar calendar, potentially making them the earliest known evidence of a proto-writing system and explaining one object of many cave paintings.