Prehistoric art for beginners

How to read the labels Historical what the old sources say. Later tradition what later writers added. Modern modern practice and my own notes.

Prehistory means the long time before writing. For most of the human story there are no texts, no names and no letters. There are only things: marks on rock, carved ivory, stones set upright, pigment and the ashes of old fires. Prehistoric art covers more time than every other page in this series put together, and it is also the most humbling, because so much of what we would love to know cannot be known.

I start every journey through art history here, because these objects teach the most important habit of all: separating what we can see from what we would like to believe.

Three layers

Historical What the objects and their dates show. Later tradition What scholars and writers have read into them since. Modern How people use them in spiritual life today.

Before pictures: the tool as art

Biface, about 600,000 to 150,000 BCE. The Metropolitan Museum of Art (2019.422). Image: Open Access, public domain (CC0).

Historical Long before anyone painted, people shaped stone. A hand axe like this one at the Met, made somewhere between about 600,000 and 150,000 years ago, was flaked on both faces into a balanced teardrop. Many are more symmetrical than they need to be for cutting. Whether that care counts as “art” is debated, but it shows a feeling for form far older than our own species.

The first marks

Historical At Blombos Cave on the southern coast of South Africa, archaeologists found pieces of red ochre engraved with cross-hatched lines, about 75,000 years old. In 2018 the team published a small stone flake with lines drawn on it in ochre crayon, about 73,000 years old, the oldest known drawing.

The oldest known cave art is in Indonesia. On the islands of Sulawesi and Muna, people pressed their hands to limestone walls and sprayed pigment around them, leaving a hand stencil. A stencil in the cave of Liang Metanduno on Muna has been dated to at least 67,800 years ago, and a painted scene in Sulawesi showing human-like figures with a wild pig to at least 51,200 years ago. These finds overturned the old idea that art “began” in Ice Age Europe.

Dates in this field come with “at least” for a reason. Uranium-series dating measures a thin crust of calcite that formed over a painting, so it gives a minimum age, and radiocarbon dates must be calibrated. Expect the numbers on this page to change.

The painted caves of Europe

Historical Chauvet-Pont d’Arc in southern France was discovered in December 1994. Most of its lions, rhinoceroses, mammoths and horses are about 36,000 years old, drawn with shading and overlapping outlines that suggest movement. Lascaux in the Dordogne was found in 1940 by teenagers. Its Hall of the Bulls holds huge aurochs, horses and deer, now best dated to about 21,000 to 23,000 years ago. Lascaux closed in 1963 because visitors’ breath was damaging it, and today you visit replicas. Altamira in northern Spain was the first cave recognized as prehistoric, in 1879, and its discoverer was accused of forgery because experts refused to believe ancient people could paint so well.

Portable art

Historical The Lion Man of Hohlenstein-Stadel, in southern Germany, is a figure about 31 centimeters tall carved from mammoth ivory around 40,000 years ago, with a lion’s head on an upright human body. It is now in Museum Ulm. It shows that its makers could imagine a being no one had ever seen.

Small female figures from Europe to Siberia are commonly called “Venus figurines”, a name given by nineteenth-century collectors that has nothing to do with the Roman goddess. The Venus of Willendorf, found in Austria in 1908 and about 30,000 years old, is in the Natural History Museum in Vienna. I describe these figures in words only, since they are nude.

Later tradition In The Language of the Goddess (1989), the archaeologist Marija Gimbutas read such figures as images of a great mother goddess worshipped across prehistoric Europe. Most archaeologists today do not accept a single goddess religion; the figures vary widely and their purposes are unknown.

Modern Many goddess-centered spiritual paths draw on this idea. That can be meaningful practice, as long as we do not present it as proven history.

Rock art around the world

Historical Rock art exists on every inhabited continent. Painted stone slabs from the Apollo 11 Cave in Namibia are around 30,000 years old. San paintings in southern Africa show people and eland in scenes that many researchers connect with ritual and trance, based on nineteenth-century records of San testimony. In Australia, rock art traditions are among the longest continuous art traditions on earth, and much of it is sacred to living Aboriginal communities. Some sites are restricted, and respecting that is part of looking well.

The great stones

Historical Göbekli Tepe in southeastern Turkey has round enclosures of massive T-shaped pillars carved with foxes, snakes, boars and birds, dated by UNESCO to between 9600 and 8200 BCE. Stonehenge in southern England was built in stages from about 3000 to about 1500 BCE, and its axis is aligned with the midsummer sunrise and midwinter sunset.

Johan Thomas Lundbye, The Artist, Seated in Front of a Dolmen, 1844. The Metropolitan Museum of Art (2014.654). Image: Open Access, public domain (CC0).

Megaliths fascinated later artists too. In 1844 the Danish painter Johan Thomas Lundbye drew himself sitting before a dolmen, a Neolithic tomb of huge upright stones.

Later tradition Popular culture links Stonehenge with the druids, but the druids of ancient Britain belong to the Iron Age, roughly two thousand years after its main building phase. Modern Modern druid groups hold ceremonies there today, a living practice with its own value rather than an unbroken ancient one.

How we read art without writing

Later tradition Early twentieth-century scholars such as Henri Breuil proposed “hunting magic”, but the animals painted are often not the ones people ate most. In the 1960s André Leroi-Gourhan looked for a structured system in the caves. David Lewis-Williams, in The Mind in the Cave (2002), argued that some rock art reflects altered states experienced in ritual. That view is influential and contested.

What we can say with confidence is simpler. These images were made with great skill, often deep in hard places, by people who returned to the same caves for thousands of years. A hand stencil says, at the very least: a person was here.

Try it yourself

Place your hand flat on paper and color all around it with soft chalk or a dabbed sponge. Lift your hand and look at the outline. Then write two lines: what this mark shows, and what it cannot tell anyone about you. That gap is the space every prehistoric interpretation lives in.

Before and after

After this: Ancient Near Eastern art.

See every movement in order on the art movements timeline, or learn to look step by step in the free Art History for Beginners course.