Welcome! I’ve always kind of been bummed there there wasn’t an active blog dedicated to paleolithic art, since theres so much beautiful art that is never really seen outside of specific art history circles, then I realized I could just do it myself! I’ll be trying to dig up some more obscure sites and art, but decent pictures can sometimes be hard to find. I’ll try my best! I’ll also be posting the smaller, often ignored panels from more famous sites if I’m able to find photos.
I mostly focus on Upper Paleolithic Europe figurative art, so stuff that's older than ~11,000 years. Europe is just where I'm most knowledgable, but I'll still research and answer questions about other places if I can. My main thing is that it's paleolithic (or equivalent, since a different term is used in the americas), since that's where my interest is. I may also post about middle or lower paleolithic stuff, but there isn't much.
Please feel free to request a certain site, ask questions, request more info about a piece, etc! I’m far from an expert, but I’ll answer the best I can. Correct me if I’m wrong about anything
Top: an incised bone disc ready for suspension on either side, from L'abri Montastruc, France (Magdalenian). Discs such as these were often made from a thin piece of scapula, usually a cervid and are generally rather small (4-5 cm in diametre).
Bottom: a bracelet made from hollowed out ivory decorated with fretwork and punctured holes for wrapping around the wrist, from Mezine, Ukraine (Gravettian).
*Barandiarán Maestu, I. 2006. Imágines y adornos en el arte portátil paleolítico. Barcelona: Ariel Prehistoria
We went to the Neanderthal museum yesterday, which is also the place where they discovered the first Neanderthal, or at least recognized it as such anyway. It was such a beautiful exhibition and the sculptures felt so alive. It gave me Big Feels and made me feel so close to these humans that once excisted.
« A closer look at some of the examples of messy and tactile activities from the Ice Age, perhaps unsurprisingly, reveals the presence of children. Once assumed to be the enigmatic marks made by trance-induced shamans practising some otherworldly hunting magic, archaeological research is increasingly showing that making cave art was a social, group-wide behaviour – and children were active participants.
A recent study by a team of researchers in Spain found that hand-stencils made deep within caves represent all members of society. Children, and even infants younger than three years old, participated in making hand-stencils alongside adolescent, adult and elderly individuals. The youngest undoubtedly would have had to be held still by an adult as ochre was sprayed over their hand to produce the stencils, giving an intimate glance into the making of this art. As discussed by the authors of this study, the social nature of this behaviour suggests that the making of art was not limited to a privileged few, but was an activity that involved everyone, enhancing group cohesion in the process. […]
Making hand-stencils seems to have been a practice that was repeated by different cultural groups throughout the Ice Age world, from the caves of Pech Merle and Gargas in modern-day France to Leang Timpuseng cave in Sulawesi. […] Even within the same cave, hand-stencils may be separated by several thousand years, implying that people returned to the same place and added their hands to the assemblage of their ancestors’ hands. This behaviour was likely a visceral experience for Ice Age people; an ancient form of handshake between hands reaching through time, and a more-or-less permanent record of having been there. […]
How much more meaningful is it, then, that children actively participated in this important cultural practice? Not only did adults install themselves within these environments, engaging with the hands left by their ancestors in the process, but they encouraged their children to do so too. […] Echoes of children’s playful behaviours can also be glimpsed in […] finger flutings – marks made by tracing fingers through the soft clay-like ‘moonmilk’ that coats cave walls. [They] were often made by children, perhaps as young as five years old. There is a distinctly childlike feel to these ribbon-like marks preserved in the cave wall; one can picture children running alongside the wall, fingers firmly pressing into the pliable, muddy surface.
[…] Children’s footprints are also often present in the same caves […]. The footprints are sometimes chaotic, with small feet overlapping one another and no clear direction from one area of the cave to another. Some have suggested this represents children dancing, painting a vivid image of children playing under the dim glow of firelight. Small crawl spaces within caves, too, were perhaps only accessible to children. The small, clumsy drawings within these spaces likely reflect children practising their own art […].
Ice Age children, much like our own children, joyfully engaged with the world in messy and creative ways – and, it seems, were actively encouraged to do so by their parents. These hand-stencils create an intimate connection with these children. Their small hands, which last touched the rock surface of cave walls tens of thousands of years ago, reach out to us from that distant and largely unknowable past. It is as if they are enticing us to connect with them and reach back in response: a tender handshake across time. »
Discovered by chance in 1994, it contains the best conserved representation of bison anywhere in Asturias, due to the fact that the cave was sealed up for thousands of years. Its 40-metre gallery has paintings dating back more than 14,000 years.
This week, new engravings have been discovered in Alkerdi cave, Urdazubi (Nafarroa).
They’re around 25,000 years old and what makes them especially valuable and unique is that they seem to be sketches, practice works by a learning artist, defying the idea that the walls were reserved just for the masterpieces, not the previous studies.
There can be seen bisons, aurochs, horses [pics 2 & 3] and other animals, as well as several vulvae [pic 1], a very uncommon motif found in very few places across Europe.
The Vogelherd horse – the oldest known sculpture of a horse. It was crafted in woolly mammoth ivory with flint tools over 35,000 years ago in southern Germany.
Horse of Lourdes, found in the Grottes des Espélugues (Lourdes, Hautes-Pyrénées, c. 13,000 BC). It is made of mammoth ivory and is 7.3cm in length.
This horse carving was found in a rock fissure in 1886. The Espélugues Caves were very much frequented, and many other tools and decorated objects have been found there. The statuette was carved longitudinally from a mammoth tusk; such tusks could reach three metres in length.
Origin of the 30,000-year-old Venus of Willendorf discovered
The almost 11-cm-high Venus figurine from Willendorf (Austria) is one of the most important examples of early art in Europe. It is made of a rock called oolite that is not found in or around Willendorf. A research team led by the anthropologist Gerhard Weber from the University of Vienna and the two geologists Alexander Lukeneder and Mathias Harzhauser as well as the prehistorian Walpurga Antl-Weiser from the Natural History Museum Vienna have now found out with the help of high-resolution tomographic images that the material from which the Venus was carved likely comes from northern Italy.
This sheds new light on the remarkable mobility of the first modern humans south and north of the Alps. The results currently appear in Scientific Reports. Read more.
"Rising sea levels are gradually effacing the cave’s display of 177 exquisite and irreplaceable paintings and engravings, dating back to 27,000 BC but Fugro will use their Geo-data scanning technology to create a permanent record of huge cultural significance."
Stone engraved drawings representing several zoomorphic creatures, most notably a horse, Prehistoric Rock-Art Sites of the Côa Valley, Portugal, circa 24000-22.000 Before Present.
Someone said on a Different post that Art is a very human trait (one captured throughout history) and I wanted to know if there is examples of art from other human cousins (neanderthals, etc.) That you could tell me about?
so we know now that Neanderthals were CLEARLY super into fiber art but we also know that they did some other amazing stuff! Neanderthals definitely had the capacity for creativity and made some really cool stuff!
Thing one: Neanderthals invented the hashtag
Ok it's not really a hashtag. It's an engraving on the wall of Gorham's Cave in Gibraltar. It's definitely Neanderthal– it predates anatomically modern human arrival by a few thousand years– and it's not a leftover artifact of tool use or hide scraping or anything. It might just be an abstract carving for fun, or it might even be a map! A kind of "you are here" in the cave.
You know what's a HUGE BIRD? The white-tailed eagle. There's multiple eagles represented in this array of talons, and there's perforations and wear-related rubbing on the facets. You can't really use eagle talons as knives and they're too curvy to be good awls– and the wear isn't on the claw tips, it's where these would have rubbed against other beads or knots on a leather thong. How impressive would this have been to see gleaming on someone's chest? And that's not all! It's also likely they used feathers for adornment, too. Feathers don't survive well, but bones do, and when you look at the long flight feathers of a bird, you'll actually see that there's these little bumps on the bird's ulna where they are. When they're pulled out with force, there's some trauma that occurs to the bone. Which we see in bird remains associated with Neanderthals!
Now there's a few reasons to pull the primary flight feathers of a bird. You can use them to write or paint, or to fletch an arrow, or as part of religious ceremonies, or you can wear them. It's a guess what the Neanderthals were doing with them, but it's an educated guess. We know they didn't have the kind of microlith points that indicated arrows that need fletching. We also know they didn't write and they didn't seem to do much in the way of painting. They could have used the feathers for religious purposes; we simply cannot know about their religion. But bird-based jewelry wasn't an isolated phenomenon to Krapina, where the talon necklace is from. There's evidence for it at other sites, too! And frankly, feathers and bird parts just look neat. There's absolutely no reason to assume that Neanderthals didn't have an aesthetic appreciation for the world around them, after all!
Thing Three: Look At This Stuff And Tell Me It Wouldn't Sell Great On Etsy
In addition to eagle talons, Neanderthals made pendants out of shells and teeth.
What's even cooler? They used the same designs as anatomically modern Homo sapiens. While the materials and designs vary, the techniques are identical, showing potential transfer of information between the species!
(Left group is anatomically modern human tools and jewelry; right group is Neanderthal.)
We also know that stuff TRAVELED. They weren't just making things for themselves that stayed in one place, they were moving materials around! And not just stone for tools, but things that could only have existed to make them look pretty.
So Neanderthals really were into shells. They actually went DIVING for them in the ocean in Italy, which is pretty incredible. And while many of those shells ended up as tools, some of them ended up as jewelry!
This shell originally wasn't broken- it just had the two holes pierced in it and could have been worn on a cord. (God, an actual cord! Not just a strip of leather but an honest to goodness braided cord! That's THEIR invention, not ours!!!) But what's super cool about this shell is that it was painted! Orange pigment was applied to it. Why? Who knows! That's the thing about looking at an extinct group's aesthetic choices. Sometimes things have deep symbolic meanings. Other times, they just look nice. I think it's kind of amazing to think about this whole rich inner life we can't really understand, but we can grasp at. The person who made this lived and died about 50,000 years ago, before anatomically modern humans were even present in the area. And yet we can know that they liked the color orange enough to take a pretty shell, carefully drill holes in it so it could be worn flat, and painted a stripe on it. An orange stripe. Did it remind them of the sunset? Of the color of a loved one's hair? Did they like the way it looked against their own skin? Or maybe the bright pigment just cheered them up! We'll never know for sure but these are all reasons we wear things. Why not them, too?
i think the ideal life form is a fat paleolithic horse. just a tremendous, rotund equine. when i see one of those round motherfuckers painted on a cave wall i know that life is worth living
The Hinds of Chaffaud, found in the Grotte de Chaffaud (Savigné, Vienne, Nouvelle-Aquitaine). It is from the Upper Paleolithic Period, made from a reindeer foot-bone, and is 13.2cm in length.
This engraving is of two hinds (female deer), with very precise details of the heads. The almond-shaped left eye is emphasized with fine hatching. A sign depicting a wing is engraved in front of the hooves of each hind, but its meaning is unknown.
