Oldest Cave Paintings

When it comes to art, humanity has been active for many thousands of years, as is clearly displayed within a French cave where the walls were decorated by in humans 26,000 years ago. Full of fantastic imagery in the guise of perfectly-preserved animal paintings, one chamber filled with monsters at 1312ft  below ground, concentrated CO2 and radon gases found there thought to have provoked the hallucinogenic images.

This so-called Chauvet-Pont-d’Arc Cave is without doubt a most mysterious place, cave walls playing host to hundreds of animal images, from Paleolithic horses,bisons and even lions, panthers, rhinos and hyenas which simply should NOT be there at all.

Among the oddest figures – hallucinogens, perhaps? – are butterfly-like creatures and chimera figures that are half-bison/ half-woman. It is a fact that these paintings are sophisticated enough, in some cases, to even have 3-D relief, even if, radiocarbon dating shows that them to have been created between 26,000 to 30,000 years ago.

However, a new find has made it seem that the very first human are of seals. painted 42,000 or more years ago, in Malaga, Spain, inside the Cave of Nerja, changing ideas about how quickly human evolution actually progressed. Dating of the charcoal found close by, with which those ancient people drew, it may be as much as 43,500 years since these images were created.

Where assumptions had it that art history was exclusively human, such notions could be turned on their heads by this find, because all  

available data indicates that the artists HAD to have been not homo sapiens, but homo neanderthalensis instead.  It is known that neanderthals ate seals, and  no proof exists of homo sapiens in this

This cave may well have been one of the last places in Europe where neanderthals (who lived from 120,000 to 35,000 years ago) were living, trying to stay ahead of the earliest homo sapiens. These humanoids decorated their bodies with paint and were aesthetically sensitive, a revolutionary notion because humans had sense this sub-species always as more animalistic than they actually were.