IN 1879, an 8-year-old girl made a discovery that would rock our understanding of human history. On the walls of Altamira cave in northern Spain, she spotted stunning drawings of bison, painted in vivid red and black. More striking even than the images was their age: they were made thousands of years ago by modern humans’ supposedly primitive ancestors. Today, nearly 400 caves across Europe have been found decorated with hand stencils, mysterious symbols and beautiful images of animals created by these accomplished artists.
The discoveries led to the view that artistic talent arose after modern humans arrived in the region some 40,000 years ago, as part of a “cultural explosion” reflecting a flowering of the human mind. But more recent evidence has blown this idea out of the water. For a start, modern humans might not have been the first artists in Europe, as paintings discovered in a Spanish cave in 2018 have revealed. What’s more, a treasure trove of cave paintings emerging in Indonesia has dispelled the idea that Europe was the epicentre of creativity. Indeed, discoveries in Africa indicate that humans were honing their artistic skills long before groups of them migrated to the rest of the world.
The real puzzle is why Stone Age cave art seems to be concentrated in a few locations. Could it be hiding elsewhere in plain sight, unnoticed, unrecognised or obscured? Efforts are now under way to track down this missing art, with growing success. The latest discoveries are revealing common themes and hidden codes shared by prehistoric people everywhere. Crack their meaning and we will get an insight into the minds of our ancestors extending back millennia.
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“The real puzzle is why Stone Age cave art seems to be in so few locations”
No other living creature represents thoughts and ideas in the form of drawings or symbols. It isn’t just aesthetically pleasing, it also provides a way to share information widely and across generations. A hint that this symbolic behaviour long predates the evolution of our species comes in the form of a 500,000-year-old shell etched with a zigzag by an ancient Homo erectus. The earliest evidence of artistic thinking in Homo sapiens is found in Blombos cave in South Africa, where show that people were experimenting with symbols 100,000 years ago. In 2018, the world’s oldest drawing, made with a red ochre crayon on a rock 73,000 years ago, was discovered there too. And there are examples of prehistoric artistry from other parts of Africa, including 100,000-year-old seashell beads found in Algeria.
Early humans that left the cradle of humanity in Africa and migrated around the world must have taken their artistic talent with them. Yet for more than a century after the discovery at Altamira, almost all known Stone Age cave art was in Europe. That changed in 2014, with an incredible finding from the opposite side of the world.
Local people have long known that the limestone caves of the island of Sulawesi, Indonesia, contain many painted images. Modern humans are thought to have , but nobody imagined the art could be very old because ancient paintings seem unlikely to survive in the tropical environment. A team of researchers led by Maxime Aubert, now at Griffith University in Australia, using a technique that is revolutionising our understanding of cave art.
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Over time, layers of calcite can slowly build up over sections of otherwise visible images, and uranium-series dating measures the levels of uranium and thorium in these to give a minimum date for when the art was created. Using this technique in seven caves, the researchers found 14 images including a painting of a babirusa (also known as a pig-deer) dating to at least 35,400 years ago, comparable to the oldest images of animals found in Europe. Another, a hand stencil – created by placing a hand on the wall and blowing paint onto it to give a silhouette – was at least 39,900 years old, making it the oldest known hand stencil at that time.
This opened a floodgate to new discoveries in Indonesia. These included a hunting scene created at least 43,900 years ago, which is the oldest known depiction of human beings, and by far the oldest narrative artwork (see “The first selfie”). “When we found that image, we were absolutely delighted, but when it turned out to be that old, we were almost fainting with joy,” says Adam Brumm, also at Griffith University. In January, his team announced that a picture of a pig in another Sulawesi cave dates back at least 45,000 years – the new record for the oldest figurative art.
Lost art of Asia
These findings are the final nail in the coffin for the idea that artistic talents were born in some “creative explosion” in Europe. And the hunt for ancient art in South-East Asia has only scratched the surface. “We have found more than 300 sites in Sulawesi with cave art that is stylistically similar and consistent,” says Brumm. “On the adjacent island of Borneo, there’s more cave art that we’ve dated.” What’s more, thousands of other islands in Indonesia have never been surveyed for paintings. “I think there’s a hell of a lot more rock art out there,” he says. We can expect older dates to emerge soon, too, because Aubert is pioneering a variation of uranium-series dating that uses lasers to pinpoint the first layers of calcite deposited over a painting. New dating techniques are also starting to pin down the age of the wealth of rock art in Australia, which has been almost impossible until now (see “Dating Australian rock art”).
Uranium-series dating is challenging our understanding of the oldest cave art in Europe too. A 2018 study of three Spanish caves by Alistair Pike at the University of Southampton, UK, and his colleagues, revealed that a hand stencil and a rectangular symbol found there are around 65,000 years old. Modern humans didn’t arrive in the region until 20,000 years later, leading the researchers to conclude that Neanderthals must have created these images. This assertion has been hotly contested. Yet regardless of who the first European artists were, we now know that around 40,000 years ago, there were two hotspots of cave art on opposite sides of Eurasia.
Despite being 13,000 kilometres apart, these artistic outpourings show some striking similarities. The images are dominated by large herbivores drawn in profile. Hand stencils are very common too. What’s more, the oldest art in both regions was already sophisticated and well developed, making it likely that this artistic style originated in earlier populations. “It must have a much older origin, probably in Africa,” says Aubert. If that is the case, he thinks a trail of earlier ice-age rock art along human migration routes.
Why hasn’t this missing art been found? One possibility is that it never existed. Just because people can make art, it doesn’t mean they will: art may have been something our ancestors only created under particular circumstances. Population size is thought to be a key factor, with a larger group more likely to come up with and spread new ideas. “If art is a social phenomenon, and therefore serves as a way to keep a complex society together, then you would expect that, when groups grow in size or perhaps get more concepts of land ownership and territory, they’re more likely to inscribe that landscape with meaning,” says Paul Pettitt at Durham University, UK. Migrating bands may have been too small and mobile to feel the need to produce much art.
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Another possibility is that they did produce art, but it hasn’t survived. If people drew on hides or wood, then these images would have perished long ago. Even on rock, preservation is a problem. The painted caves of France and Spain are anomalies compared with other locations around the world, where humidity crumbles cave walls and trickling water washes away paint or causes a thick layer of calcite to form, obscuring the pigment. “The very old stuff is likely to be less visible to the naked eye,” says Genevieve von Petzinger at the University of Victoria, Canada. “Yet there are now so many high-tech tools that we can use to reveal it.”
A digital enhancement technique called , for example, brings out elements of drawings that are nearly invisible to the naked eye. Developed to detect signals from space, it has been used by NASA to enhance images captured by its Mars rover, Perseverance. Then there is multispectral imaging, which uses different ranges of the light spectrum, from infrared to ultraviolet, to pick up faded traces of red ochre hidden behind layers of calcite. Spectral analysis of pigments can give a “recipe” for the paint used, providing clues about whether different paintings were made at the same time. Such sophisticated imaging techniques have already uncovered many hidden Stone Age images. For example, a high-tech survey of Bernoux cave in the Dordogne region of France, which has been studied by archaeologists since 1932, , including two drawings of mammoths – creatures that are quite rare in the menagerie of depictions.
Art is also being uncovered in places where it previously wasn’t thought to exist. Archaeologist Aitor Ruiz-Redondo at the University of Southampton, UK, is at the forefront of this hunt, targeting caves where early humans were known to reside. In 2019, he and his colleagues uncovered the , at Romual’s cave in Croatia. It depicts a bison and an ibex, plus two human-like figures. Last year, he led a survey of , which uncovered a rare depiction of a camel, a mammoth seemingly protecting her calf and unique graphic symbols including inverted trapezoids. The fieldwork was curtailed by the covid-19 pandemic, but Ruiz-Redondo hopes to return soon and says there are many more images to discover. , including a rhinoceros drawn in charcoal some 30,000 years ago; woolly rhinos lived in the region at that time. And there are tantalising hints that images in Mongolia might be equally old.
“The cave art from Indonesia and central, eastern and western Europe has features that look alike,” says Ruiz-Redondo. He thinks they could have a common origin in the Near East, where humans first settled after leaving Africa. With that in mind, he has his eyes set on the Levant for future exploration. Others believe we might yet find the origins of cave art in Africa. To date, the oldest known figurative art there is just 27,000 years old, and even that is disputed. It consists of found in the Apollo 11 cave in Namibia, decorated with images of animals drawn with charcoal and ochre. But most of the continent hasn’t been explored archaeologically, so there could be plenty of cave art yet to be discovered, says Eleanor Scerri at the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History in Jena, Germany.
Now that we know this art is more widespread than was long assumed, and displays consistent characteristics across vast stretches of space and time, the million-dollar question is what these hand stencils, drawings and symbols mean. Over the years, researchers have come up with all sorts of ideas: that the images were related to hunting rituals, sexual symbols or the connection to the spirit world, which today remains an integral part of the lives of many hunter-gatherers. Some doubt that we will ever know. “It’s frustrating,” says Ruiz-Redondo. “It means something for sure, but we cannot solve this question.” But as more examples emerge, people are increasingly optimistic that we can decode at least some of the information embodied in cave art.
“Cave art is now being uncovered in places it wasn’t though to exist”
To that end, Georges Sauvet at the University of Toulouse-Jean Jaurès in France has built a database containing details of more than 4700 drawings, paintings and engravings of animals found in the caves of France and Spain. Studying this wealth of information, he noticed a striking trend: Stone Age people were obsessed with horses. They are the , appearing in 29.5 per cent of the images, compared with 23.3 per cent for bison and 11.1 per cent for deer. Three quarters of all his sites contain at least one horse. Other animals are usually drawn facing to the left. “The horse appears to be the exception,” says Sauvet. Not only do most face right, they are often depicted larger than other animals and in more prominent positions in caves. Excavations show that horses weren’t a major food source for these people, so their fascination with them must have been for other reasons.
The ancient hunter-gatherers of Indonesia were even more obsessed with one particular animal: the pig. A survey of by Yosua Pasaribu at the University of Indonesia found around 80 per cent of the animals depicted were pigs. “These early human cultures were besotted with one species of pig in particular, which is endemic to Sulawesi: the warty pig,” says Brumm.
Equally fascinating is the lack of depictions of animals that these people would have frequently encountered, such as wolves and foxes in Europe, and small animals such as rabbits that formed a large part of their diet. “Palaeolithic art is not a picture of the environment, but the lifeworld of these ancient hunter-gatherers,” says Sauvet. “It’s a cultural selection of the animals that surround them.”
Decoding graphic marks is even trickier because they are abstract. But large databases and statistical analysis can shed some light on these Stone Age codes too. “We can find a scientifically sound way to approach the question of meaning,” says von Petzinger, who has created a database of graphic symbols on the cave walls of Europe. She has identified 32 symbols that are used repeatedly. Some, notably lines and dots, are common and found in the oldest art. Others, such as a feather-like shape, originate in one region then spread to new areas. Studying which symbols are placed beside each other, or next to animals, gives some insight into these early experiments with codification. “I think most of us would agree that it is a form of writing,” says Pettitt. “Visually, I see little difference between these [signs] and the earliest Sumerian impressions on clay, which are always interpreted as the earliest writing systems. Presumably these signs are saying something about the animals they are depicted next to.”
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However, just like with the symbols that people use to communicate today, the same signs could have had different meanings to the various groups that used them. Meaning could also vary depending on their context, says von Petzinger. Take the lowly dot, a symbol found in most European cave art. “In certain caves, dots may well be path markers. In other cases, they could be some sort of tallying systems,” she says. They can be grouped to form what looks like a depiction of a constellation or, on an animal, could represent a wound, she says. “It’s a very simple character with a huge amount of information embedded in it.” The complex quadrilateral signs found in caves in northern Spain are similar. Sauvet and his colleagues think the variability of details drawn within each of these shapes suggests they were used as .
“What do all these hand stencils, drawings and symbols mean?”
Can we ever know for sure what messages these Stone Age artists were trying to convey? “Probably not,” says von Petzinger. “But, at the same time, we may be able to tease out some new information.” And the more examples of their work we discover, the more insight we will have into their minds. “We have such a small fraction of what used to exist that every image we can find is a crucial piece of the jigsaw,” she says. “It’s an exciting time.”
DATING AUSTRALIAN ROCK ART
Humans may have arrived in Australia as early as 65,000 years ago. Thousands of rock art sites are found there, but dating these artworks is extremely challenging because the geography means there is a lack of the minerals and organic material generally used to establish age. A breakthrough came this year, courtesy of Damien Finch at the University of Melbourne and his colleagues, working with the Balanggarra Aboriginal Corporation, which represents the traditional owners of the land. They dated images in eight rock shelters in Kimberley, Western Australia. Using radiocarbon measurements from fossilised wasp nests lying beneath and on top of the artworks, they found Australia’s oldest known image: a large kangaroo painted between 17,500 and 17,100 years ago.
This record is unlikely to last long, becasue there are already hints of older images. A has been unearthed in 28,000-year-old sediments in an Arnhem Land rock shelter. In Kimberley, a was found in sediments dating back 40,000 years.
THE FIRST SELFIE
One of the most striking things about the oldest cave art is what the painters left out. In European caves, people represent less than 3.3 per cent of the images of animals. They are rare in South-East Asian cave art too. What’s more, whereas animals are depicted with great virtuosity, humans are often stick figures. “In the Palaeolithic world, there were very few humans,” says prehistorian . “They lived in small groups of 20 to 25 people, with the next group maybe 50 miles away. Their world was full of animals, and animals were of much more importance than humans.”
One of the most remarkable cave drawings of the human form is in a limestone cave called Leang Bulu’ Sipong 4 on the island of Sulawesi, Indonesia. It depicts at least eight small, human-like figures with spears or ropes hunting two pigs and four dwarf buffaloes. Painted at least 43,900 years ago, these are the oldest known human figures in art. “They’re almost stick-like, with a human-like body but what seem to be animal heads,” says Adam Brumm at Griffith University in Australia. “One has a bird-like head.” Such human-animal chimeras are found in later cave art, but their presence here is significant. “It’s the earliest known evidence for the human ability to conceive of the supernatural, and that is one of the fundamental requirements for religious thought and belief,” he says.
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Article amended on 4 August 2021
We have amended the caption for the image of rock art showing a kangaroo
