What do you think about the old stone age or the Palaeolithic period of time, first you might think of the cave art, their lifestyles, their tools, etc, right? The paintings, drawings, and engraving on cave walls are the type most talked about. Even though scholars are fascinated for generations over generations. Well, here in this article I am going to discuss 5 key things about Prehistoric cave Art.
1.The Palaeolithic art, Neanderthals started and it spans tens of thousands of years. We used to think of an old image of horses as the earliest phases but that was not figurative. It was marks of the body’s hands being placed against walls, and fingers being covered in pigment, and that probably originated by the Neanderthals approximately 64,000 years ago.
2. There is a painting in the cave of Altamira, Spain, and that Art wasn’t made by Homo Sapiens or humans of that time. Now wondering? That figurative art we think of when we think of cave art appeared 40000 years ago by that time human beings had been in Europe for just a few thousand years and Neanderthals started to extinct.
3. It is dominated by hunted herbivores, when we think about those ancient prehistoric animal cave art, as it is overwhelmingly dominated by images of those animals that were so important to hunt. Those herbivores on the steppe grasslands of Europe.
4. Well, it changes with time, now we can see lots of experiments with stylistic change. The ways we portray the horses or the ways we represent them have developed a lot. This change which happens over 25000 years of figurative cave art, there was a considerable change in the way people thought that how it should be done.
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5. Prehistoric Art, Sculpture, and the Pictures that represent, that earlier art forms from the prehistoric era were usually drawings of animals with arrows or spears in them whereas humans were rarely featured till later in the middle Paleolithic period. So prehistoric art forms consist mainly of animals such as cattle, mammoths, reindeer, Bison, and aurochs. Further analysis of prehistoric art forms showed that 75% of these artworks were created by hunters while some 15% were created by gatherers. Moreover, Human sculptures and artworks began to feature in prehistoric art during the Upper Paleolithic period in the form of stick sketches and the Venus figurine.
6. Do You know Where is the Oldest Cave Paintings Located? The El Castillo cave paintings in Cantabria Spain are the oldest paintings that have been discovered to this date, which are approximately old as 39,000 BCE. Another painting is the Leang Timpuseng cave in Indonesia which is dated to have been painted in 37,500 BCE. And the third oldest painting has been found in the Chauvet cave in France created around 30,000 BCE.
7. prehistoric Drawing and Painting Materials are the art forms in the middle and upper Paleolithic eras that were much more developed than the bone pickings and scratches of the lower Paleolithic era. Prehistoric artists used their fingers, bird feathers, and animal bones as drawing tools. While for painting, the prehistoric artist took advantage of the different types of clay to produce red, brown, and yellow colors. And for black, charcoal and mud mixed with cave water were used in creating the color black.
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