- Why does very old cave art only show animals and not people or abstract squiggles? The art of Chauvet (more than 30,000 years old) and Altamira (up to 36,000 years) only depicts animals, many of which are now extinct. Only more recently does rock art like the Cueva de las Manos (up to 9,000 years) in South America and San rock art in Africa prominently include human figures and abstract shapes.
- Why hasn’t more very old cave art been discovered outside of Europe? We know about more than 300 caves in France and Spain that contain prehistoric art. There are some examples of non-European cave art that’s also very old, including what is possibly the oldest art ever found from Borneo (44,000 years), but this is comparatively rare.
- Why do European caves have relatively little art from more recent times? Why isn’t there European cave art that’s 5,000 years old?
- Why is cave art so good? The artistic standard is very high. To reach that level, the artists must’ve practiced before painting their cave walls, so why do we see no evidence of that? Did they only practice on more perishable surfaces? Why are there no cave walls that had kids scribbling on them like the walls of my house?
- Why is cave art stylistically similar despite being created 1000s of years and kilometers apart? How can any artistic style, or any culture persist over millennia, especially without writing?
- How different was the cave art when it was first created? To what extent did the appearance of the pigments change? Do we see what the artists intended? At least for Chauvet, it’s assumed that the art hasn’t changed.
- Why did they paint in a cave where it’s dark and no-one can see your work? Any artist who did that nowadays would be considered excentric even for artist standards. Do we only see the tiny fraction of art that was painted in the darkness of caves because that’s what survived, and if so, was it painted by excentric individuals?
- Would a hypothetical cave painting that’s 50,000 or 100,000 years old have any chance of surviving until now? How sure can we be that the absence of paintings that old is due to human culture not being far enough along, rather than the limited longevity of the art?
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Nehaveigur 
7 responses to “Questions about Cave Art”
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