Prehistoric artworks have been discovered on numerous cave walls around the world. They tell us about the minds and lives of ancient humans as well as about their relationship with the now extinct megafauna that surrounded them. Michael Gross reports. Prehistoric artworks have been discovered on numerous cave walls around the world. They tell us about the minds and lives of ancient humans as well as about their relationship with the now extinct megafauna that surrounded them. Michael Gross reports. Caves in Western Europe such as Chauvet, Lascaux and Altamira host some of the earliest artworks known to date. The vivid and widely known paintings of ancient European animals are between 15,000 and 40,000 years old. They include representations of megafauna that has since then become extinct, such as woolly mammoths and rhinos. The shaft of the Lascaux cave contains images interpreted as a hunting scene, dated to around 17,000 years ago. A recent discovery on the island of Sulawesi (Indonesia) has now pushed back the time limit for such scenes by another 20,000 years, while emphasising the global spread of the phenomenon. The group of Adam Brumm from Griffith University at Brisbane, Australia, has discovered artwork in the limestone cave of Leang Bulu’ Sipong 4. The researchers used uranium–thorium dating to determine the age of secondary mineral deposits covering parts of the images, thus gaining a minimal age for the images themselves. The ages obtained range from 35,000 to 44,000 years. This result makes the work both the earliest figurative artwork and the earliest record of storytelling in the world. The Sulawesi hunting scene shows four dwarf buffalos (anoas, Bubalus sp.) as well as two pig-like animals. These are apparently being hunted with spears and possibly ropes by at least eight simplified and stylised ‘stick figure’ humans, which are shown much too small in scale comparison to the animals. These figures show some animal attributes, including in one case a tail and in another a bird beak. Brumm and colleagues therefore interpret them as human–animal hybrid figures or therianthropes. If correct, this interpretation would add another record to the discovery, as it would beat the lion–man figurine from the Hohlenstein-Stadel cave in Germany to become the oldest known representation of a therianthrope. An alternative interpretation would be that the scene depicts human hunters who for reasons of ritual or camouflage are wearing assorted animal parts. In either case, it offers a unique window into the minds of prehistoric humans showing them to use their imagination and to possess a rich inner life. It is significant that such evidence of early human creativity has now been found around the globe, suggesting that it represents a hallmark of our species rather than a local cultural achievement brought about by developments in Ice Age Europe. Chris Stringer from the Natural History Museum in London, UK, comments on the Sulawesi find: “Certainly these paintings confirm that any Eurocentric narrative of the development of such complex representational art must be wrong. In my view, comparable artistic creations in Australia will eventually be placed to this same remote period of time, and even older representational art may one day be found in Africa, preceding significant dispersals of modern humans from there, beginning around 60,000 years ago.” While the most widely known examples of cave art are located in France and Spain, the hunting scene in Indonesia joins a growing wave of such discoveries around the world. Thus, Aitor Ruiz-Redondo from the University of Bordeaux, France, and colleagues recently reported the first prehistoric figurative art to be found in the Balkans (Antiquity (2019) 93, 297–312). The paintings first discovered at Romualdova Pećina (‘Romuald’s Cave’) in Croatia in 2010 include depictions of a bison, an ibex and two possible anthropomorphic figures. Excavations of the ground below these paintings led to the discovery of a number of Palaeolithic remains, including a flint tool, an ochre crayon and several fragments of charcoal.Big beasts: Vivid depictions of large animals were found in several caves across France and Spain: the image shows a reproduction of buffalo cave art found in Altamira, Cantabria. (Photo: Thomas Quine/Flickr (CC BY-SA 2.0).)View Large Image Figure ViewerDownload Hi-res image Download (PPT) These objects were carbon-dated to 17,000 years, but the researchers conclude from circumstantial evidence that the paintings are even older, possibly up to 34,000 years. Definitive dates are yet to be established. Even further away from the classic sites of European cave art, painted walls have also been discovered in the Ural mountains in Russia. The group of Vladislav Zhitenev at Lomonosov Moscow State University recently discovered an image showing a two-humped camel in the Kapova cave in the Southern Ural region, where numerous other images of other animals had already been found previously. This finding is unusual and significant as such animals did not exist in the area at that time (preliminary estimate 14,500 to 37,700 years), suggesting that artists, or maybe portable versions of their images, moved over large distances. The Ural caves also display a distinct local flavour showing that cave art was not one cultural wave sweeping Palaeolithic Europe. New discoveries were also made in the Caribbean. On Puerto Rico’s Mona Island, Alice Sansom from the University of Leicester, UK, and colleagues explored a complex cave system and characterised thousands of images hidden away in chambers far from the light of the cave entrances (J. Arch. Sci. (2017) 88, 24–36). Carbon and uranium series dating of the artworks confirmed that they were of pre-Columbian age, dating to the 13th to 15th century. Thus, the challenge for archaeologists in this case is to establish the relationship between the art in these caves, which were clearly places of special importance for the island residents, and the evidence of their lives above ground. Detailed analyses revealed that phosphorite (derived from mineralised guano), naturally occurring ochres from cave floors, and charcoal were the main constituents of the paints, which were sometimes mixed with plant gums. An important part of the imagery was produced by extractive techniques like scraping and scratching. All of these results indicate that visitors to the caves tended to engage with the materials encountered there, rather than bringing something of the outside world into the cave. As the authors note, more vivid pigments would have been available outside. Recent studies of pre-Columbian rock art have also brought new insights in Texas, where the group of Karen Steelman from the Shumla Archaeological Research & Education Center applied portable X-ray fluorescence spectroscopy (pXRF) to analyse the composition of the paint in ten caves of the Lower Pecos Canyonlands. They discovered complex layers of pigment, indicating a level of sophistication seen in other Lower Pecos sites, produced by the hunter-gatherer society that occupied the region from 2500 BCE to 500 CE. As Steelman reported at the American Chemical Society’s spring 2019 meeting at Orlando, Florida, the elemental analyses also enabled the researchers to identify 20th century damage to the paintings as being caused by gunshots. The classic discoveries of Ice Age European cave art have often been discussed as evidence of the birth of the modern human mind. Imagining things well enough to draw them on a cave wall has been referred to as a precursor not just to art but also to storytelling, the evolution of religion (Curr. Biol. (2019) 29, R426–R429), and complex society. The traditional assumption has been that modern humans had these abilities and Neanderthals did not. Only a few years ago, for instance, psychologist Richard Coss from the University of California at Davis, USA, argued that the hunting technique of spear throwing gave modern humans the hand–eye coordination that also enabled them to become artists (Evol. Stud. Imagin. Cult. (2017) 2, 15–38). In Africa, where megafauna had co-evolved with human weaponry and learned to mistrust our ancestors, throwing skills became vital for human hunters. Neanderthals, by contrast, who had left Africa early and encountered a more unsuspecting fauna in Eurasia, used their spears at short range. Thus, Coss argues, they never evolved the skills of our artist ancestors. Some evidence of symbolic thinking in Neanderthals has been accumulating, but has remained controversial. In 2018, the group of Dirk Hoffmann at the Max Planck Institute of Evolutionary Anthropology (EVA) at Leipzig, Germany, upset the traditional view of the uncultivated Neanderthals with dating results that place cave decorations firmly in the time window before modern humans arrived in Europe (Science (2018) 359, 912–915). The researchers used the uranium–thorium dating methodology which they had developed two years earlier to analyse the age of carbonate crusts overlaying painted or marked walls in three caves in different regions of Spain, including La Pasiega in Cantabria, Maltravieso in Extremadura, and Ardales in Andalucía. In all three caves they obtained a range of datings for different features, with the minimum age for the oldest marks in each determined to be 64,800 years or older. Thus, in all three caves, marks and presumed artworks including spots, geometric patterns and one-hand stencils have been created at least 20,000 years before the widely accepted arrival time of modern humans in Iberia. If these dates are correct, the only interpretation possible is that Neanderthals decorated these walls. These earliest datings include no figurative art. In a separate paper applying the same techniques to finds of perforated and stained sea shells, Hoffmann and colleagues also arrive at dates that firmly indicate Neanderthal authorship (Sci. Adv. (2018) 4, eaar5255). Referring to the debate of previous cultural artifacts associated with Neanderthals, which could conceivably have been the result of cultural contact with modern humans, the Châtelperronian complex, the authors conclude at the end of their Science paper that their new results remove any doubts of the artistic abilities of Neanderthals: “By showing that the Châtelperronian is but a late manifestation of a long-term indigenous tradition of Neandertal symbolic activity, our results bring closure to this debate.” This optimism soon proved to be misplaced, as the findings only stoked the debate. Several research groups published comments casting doubt on the findings. The group of Adam Brumm, who analysed the Sulawesi hunting scene with the same methodology, as discussed above, questioned in one of the three cases whether the pigmentation was an intentional artwork, and in the others whether the carbonate layer was necessarily more recent than the art. Hoffmann and colleagues published a reply to defend their conclusions (J. Hum. Evol. (2019) 135, 102644). In a separate line of criticism, Randall White from New York University (USA) and colleagues question the validity of the approach relying on the earliest of the range of uranium–thorium results, claiming that these could be outliers caused by uranium leaching (J. Hum. Evol. (2019) https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jhevol.2019.102640). They also argue that such datings should on their own not be considered sufficient to overturn the established models based on a large body of archaeological evidence. Jean-Jacques Hublin at EVA calls for moderation in a debate that has long been notorious for extreme views. “In my view, the current evidence rather points to a grey zone where Neanderthals display some features that are reminiscent of those of recent Homo sapiens but with much less complexity and at a low frequency,” Hublin comments. “There is some level of ‘symbolic expression’ in Neanderthals. However, these manifestations are quite rare and crude, especially when one considers the astronomical number of Neanderthal sites that have been studied in western Eurasia.” He also points out that, as most art created by prehistoric humans and hominins did not survive, we may be lacking crucial pieces in the jigsaw. “The fact is that rock art only preserves under exceptional conditions and most of it disappeared very quickly especially when developed in open rock-shelters or cliffs. The first occurrences of figurative representations of animals at both ends of Eurasia almost simultaneously suggests to me that this behaviour pre-existed in some form and was probably embedded in the cultural package of our direct ancestors before their final spread over this continent. We may simply miss its oldest expression because it did not survive.” Ultimately, as Carles Lalueza-Fox from the Institute of Evolutionary Biology at Barcelona, Spain, points out, DNA sequencing may one day reveal who the artists were: “One possibility to resolve this controversy would be to try to retrieve DNA directly from some of those very old paintings, especially those that were supposed to be formed by blowing the pigment onto the rock surface — likely mixing it with saliva — and see if there are Neanderthal DNA sequences in there.” Looking back at prehistoric cave art from our vantage point in the age of the selfie, it is striking that the ancient artists appear to have had very little interest in immortalising themselves or other human beings. Portraits are absent, and the only references to the human form are handprints or stencils and simplified, essentially faceless, stick figures like the ones in the Sulawesi hunting scene, which are often minuscule in comparison to the wildlife that appears in the same frame. As the writer Barbara Ehrenreich has pointed out in a recent essay in the magazine The Baffler (https://bit.ly/3ahMj9d), the apparent modesty of the artists reflects the egalitarian nature of hunter-gatherer societies before the Neolithic revolution. The development of agriculture some 12,000 years ago created the basis for the accumulation of riches for some humans, thus inequality, differentiation of tasks, political hierarchies, and wars (Curr. Biol. (2013) 23, R667–R670). In hunter-gatherer societies living hand to mouth and having only as many possessions as they could carry, individuals were as equal as the stick figures of the drawings. There was no king who could have paid an artist to glorify his image. In the absence of a social hierarchy, the artists, although clearly skilful, did not seek to glorify their own image either. What they did glorify, however, was the megafauna surrounding them. Even in European caves we find representations of all the big beasts that were soon to disappear from Europe and only survived in Africa, if at all. Ironically, late Pleistocene and Holocene human hunters likely played a large part in the extinction of the animals that they immortalised in their cave art (Curr. Biol. (2015) 25, R965–R967). Many of the animals depicted would not have made a plausible target for subsistence hunting. Major carnivores would have been competitors and threats rather than targets. Overall, however, the art conveys the image of humans who were aware that they are just a small part of a natural world populated by a diversity of animals, which clearly fascinated the early artists. As Ehrenreich points out, multiple retracings of the same images, creating eerie illusions of movement to today’s viewers, may indicate that generations of artists acquired their drawing skills and possibly their knowledge of a vanishing fauna by retracing. Today, as our selfish and wasteful ways are clearly destroying the environment on a global scale and much faster than prehistoric hunting, the modest awe with which our ancestors depicted the natural world around them may be the most important message we receive from the depth of time.