If the earliest known examples of cave art are to be believed, Stone Age hunters who discovered an animal outline tucked away in the rock face may have made them. It’s not out of the realm of possibility. Cave paintings are almost always depicted with animals as the subject matter. Neither women nor men can be located (the contrast with Paleolithic sculpture is striking). Other animals other than those hunted and eaten are also a surprise. It’s possible to see a reindeer in Chauvet Cave, but that’s rare. As with bison and horses, Ibex and the Franco-Cantabrian triangle are not as common as they once were. Other animals, like hares and birds, appear less frequently than dangerous animals like the woolly rhinoceros or lions in the Chauvet cave and in other depictions. Extinct animals like the woolly rhinoceros and aurochs, which can be found in their extinct relatives, were able to be depicted by cave painters.

As these animals were only known to those who had a safe distance to observe them, the drawings of mammoths and rhinoceros are simplified. Compared to other animals, they have an incredible level of realism. Lascaux’s “great hall,” where the bulls are depicted, has a ceiling so realistically stamped that you can almost hear the hooves. In the entire universe, only one person possesses both animal and human traits. In the Chauvet and Lascaux caves, a shaman wearing a mask may be depicted. A box with sticks for legs and arms is the most primitive depiction of human beings in cave paintings. They were also not deafeningly. Some of these geometric patterns have been interpreted as male and female sexual symbols, along with more realistic depictions of animals.

The naturalism of cave paintings, on the other hand, may be misleading. Paleolithic artists had to work within established visual conventions, whether they were aware of them or not. Various animal species could be depicted because the artists painted from memory. It is rare to see a deer with its head turned to look behind it or directly at the viewer, as you see with horses, mammoths, and bison. A mammoth’s domed head and trunk and a bison’s hump can be recognised from a single flowing line thanks to these conventions. Our ability to read this type of shorthand almost unconsciously is likely to have the opposite effect on us in other ways because of our knowledge of later works of art. As can be seen in the paintings, there were no boundaries to the Paleolithic artist’s work. A lot of us do not think about how fabricated a painting’s canvas or other defined field is when we see it on a wall. The boundaries of the pictorial field were not defined by the use of framing devices in cave art. In other words, there aren’t any background details, ground lines, or shadows. Stretching a horse’s legs doesn’t tell us whether it’s flying or dead, and the size difference between a hyena and a much smaller panther doesn’t necessarily indicate distance.