Twenty-thousand-year-old cave paintings? Didn’t Stone Age simpletons, bored between hunting parties, doodle these? Well, no. Over the past twenty years there have been so many new discoveries about Ice Age art that it’s surprising how little resonance this has had in contemporary art and culture. But that has been changing lately.

Artist Peter Piller, a professor at Dusseldorf Academy, has devoted an entire cycle of works in recent years to Ice Age art: photographs and drawings grouped into conceptual ensembles. In 2023, Hito Steyerl held an exhibition titled “Contemporary Cave Art.” The installation featured shepherds responding to the Bitcoin craze with cheese-based resistance from Asturian caves—while animal drawings from the Chauvet Cave in Ardèche, France were AI animated.

Rachel Kushner’s novel *Creation Lake *is partly about a scruffy old leftist who is obsessed with Neanderthal art and spends most of his time in caves. And Austrian comic artist Ulli Lust’s graphic novel Woman as Human: At the Dawn of History deservedly won this year’s German Nonfiction Prize for its scientifically sound narrative about patriarchal ideology and the actual origins of human art as the art of women.

Why are some, including me, turning to very ancient art? Given the multiple crises of the present, there seems to be a hint of escapism involved—an escape into the distant past. Yet this interest in the origins of image-creation and art-making also comes exactly at a historic moment when large aspects of these endeavors are being taken over by machines. So, as we are increasingly engulfed by AI slop, why did humans start picturing in the first place? What the hell did and do we want to achieve with it?

Everyone who has ever been in decorated caves, or at prehistoric rock-art sites, seems to agree on one thing: it touches and moves you. Not because it feels haunted or because one is necessarily spiritually or religiously moved, but because these places are sublime. One has an immediate sense of the immense depth of eons and eras, and yet this history feels up close, like you’d just stepped off a time machine. And despite all the scientific knowledge about these places, the meaning of the art remains a mystery simply because we don’t have, and maybe never will have, decipherable explanations from its creators. Which, of course, arouses detective-like curiosity.

Didn’t someone just mention “Neanderthal art”? Yes, there is serious evidence for that too. For example, the oval floor constructions made of stalagmites in the Bruniquel Cave in southern France: uranium dating has determined the age of these construction to be 176,000 years(!).1 There were surely no Homo sapiens in Europe yet, only Neanderthals. The classic caricature of the ape-like Neanderthal—an influential early rendering of which was produced in 1909 by Czech painter František Kupka, who would soon venture into avant-garde abstraction—has dominated the public imagination well into the present: receding forehead, naked or wearing scraps of fur, swinging a roughly hewn club. That image has been disproved scientifically time and again: they wore shoes, were skilled in weaponry and hunting, knew the healing uses of plants and mushrooms, and were capable of planned and empathetic behavior (which also implies that they had a language). And the last bastion of distinction—art or not?!—now seems to have fallen as well.

Which would be an enrichment rather than a loss. Bruniquel is not the only find. To understand the traces of Neanderthals—focusing mainly on France and Spain—it’s also important to understand what Cro-Magnon, the Homo sapiens of the Ice Age in Europe, created in terms of art in that same region. Not least during the time when Neanderthals were still alive.

According to the current scientific knowledge, Homo sapiens appeared in Europe around forty-five thousand years ago, while Neanderthals died out around thirty-eight thousand years ago. This means that the two groups overlapped for seven thousand years. More than a decade ago, we learned that the genes of a large proportion of humanity consist of around two to three percent Neanderthal genetic material, and that Neanderthals and Homo sapiens interbred. What if Neanderthals live on not only in the human genetic makeup, but also in the (pre)history of art? In other words, what if they influenced it during an early, decisive phase? And what does that mean for the art of Homo sapiens?

In search of answers, early this summer I set off for France and Spain to descend into some caves. I am well aware that what I encountered there is only a small (if significant) part of the whole global picture. In 2018 an ochre stone with diamond-shaped hatching from the Blombos Cave in South Africa was dated to seventy-three thousand years ago.2 And in Indonesia, on the island of Sulawesi, a cave painting of a pig surrounded by small human figures was found in 2019. The hunting scene was recently dated to fifty-one thousand years ago—dramatically earlier than figurative scenes in Europe.3

A month before my trip, I booked cave tours, just like other people book tables at fine-dining restaurants. Except that this was significantly cheaper, more in the realm of an affordable museum visit, at around twelve euros. It was to be an incredible trip, and describing the individual stages of it is well beyond the scope of this article. But at this point I can say one thing: each of the caves I visited raised at least one fundamental question that continues to preoccupy me. These are questions about the beginnings of art, about why humans make art in the first place. These questions bring me back, eventually, to the contemporary moment.

Four caves, four questions. You could describe them as scientific riddles about the aesthetic quirks of humans.

Périgord: Did They Paint What They Ate?

The Rouffignac Cave, in the heart of the Périgord, is so different from other caves that it’s almost absurd. Where many are narrow, cramped, and winding, this one feels like an underground city populated by animals. The way it is visited further emphasizes this: an electric mini-train takes visitors through two of the eight kilometers of the cave system. During World War II, the Resistance hid here.

The train moves slowly, passing mammoths as the tour guide narrates. It is as if the mammoths too were roaming the interior landscape of the cave, between calcite veils and flint layers, as friezes of up to eleven pachyderms. There are other animals in the cave as well, but there are no fewer than 158 mammoths, more than anywhere else. They are engraved, or painted with black lines, or a combination of both.

Why so many mammoths? Did people maybe paint what they ate? There is no definitive answer. There are false answers that can be ruled out—for example, that those who were artistically active here were part of a clan that mainly ate mammoths, and that therefore the art on the cave wall is an evocative tribute to their favorite meal. This is just as unlikely here as it is in Lascaux Cave, which mainly depicts aurochs, horses, and bison, even though over 90 percent of what people ate in the area was reindeer.

However, it is possible that the depictions in Rouffignac are related to the fluctuating presence of mammoths in the region. The images are estimated to be around thirteen thousand years old, meaning they were created during the last Ice Age (which ended approximately 11,600 years ago). During this era of late glacial transition, there was an interglacial warming period in the northern hemisphere. There is evidence that the images were created when the woolly mammoth population in this region was endangered; they had already disappeared completely from the Iberian Peninsula. One theory is that the need to depict them, and indeed the frequency with which they were depicted, was a reaction to signs of their disappearance—interpreted as a cosmic catastrophe of natural events, which humans saw themselves as part of (scientists are still debating exactly how the combination of climate change and hunting led to the extinction of the mammoth).4 In this interpretation, the depictions are a kind of remembrance for the future, or a prayer, or both.

The little train stops about seven hundred meters from the entrance. The tour then reaches a hall with a relatively low, evenly proportioned ceiling covered with images. It’s as if we have arrived at a festival site where the mammoths also strive to be, because here they meet other animal species—bison, horses, ibex, rhinos. A kind of animal cluster, a constellation, a mosaic. Stylistically, everything appears to be from a single hand, with strokes as simple as they are confident. Before everything was prepared for visitors, there was a slide here that led from one meter below the ceiling down into a sloping seven-meter shaft. A whirl of images above the abyss—the creation of which must have required some kind of wooden scaffolding, at least in parts. Why in this precarious location? It is conceivable that creating and viewing the images was deliberately linked to a challenging, even dangerous situation. There are numerous other examples in other caves of this combination of iconographic significance and precariousness of access. In the Pech-Merle Cave, for example, figures are drawn high up on a ceiling, on top of toppled rocks. In the Lascaux Cave there is a strange hunting scene, which Georges Bataille wrote about repeatedly, painted on the wall of a shaft that is hard to climb down, where oxygen levels are reduced.

Back on the well-lit little train, I notice a staging of contrasts—between modern people, who are used to automated means of transport and group-friendly rides in amusement parks, and Ice Age people, who once groped through impenetrable darkness with flickering torches and animal-fat lamps.

Cantabria: Was There an Artistic Tradition in the Caves?

There are similarities between the caves in southern France and northern Spain, even down to the way some animals are depicted. There were undoubtedly contacts and migratory movements. In Cantabria, an hour’s drive west of the port city of Santander, lies the Chufín Cave, nestled among hills dotted with grazing cows. It is one of the smaller, more winding caves. On the day of my visit it is closed to the public because a six-member archaeological team from the University of Santander is conducting excavations.

Team leader Diego Gárate Maidagán explains what it’s all about: his team is digging directly beneath engravings in the entrance area. The schematic representations of deer, fish, and bison are estimated to be around twenty-five thousand years old. The theory is that once the layers of earth are exposed, it will be possible to date them more accurately—and learn more about the circumstances surrounding their artistic creation. Literally no stone is left unturned, and with angelic patience, the position of each stone is recorded with a special measuring camera. This will enable the sediment layers and the relationships between the objects—stone tools, bones, pieces of animal horn—to be reconstructed later.

Maidagán is convinced that people invested considerable material and time into creating cave paintings—a process that can be roughly reconstructed, from obtaining the tools to producing the colors from ocher and manganese to lighting the caves with oil lamps. Perhaps more divisions of labor and hierarchies were involved than previously thought? There is much to suggest that the extremely precise flint tools were created by specialists—as was probably the case with most of the art—and that this was not something just done during downtime between hunting trips. This would mean there was a tradition in the form of “schools,” a quasi-“academic” education. Why did we ever assume that this was *not *the case?

From the entrance area you crawl towards the interior of the cave. There, bizarre beige-colored rock formations spread out from the ceiling, like fossilized folds of a giant cloak. In the light of LED lamps, striking rows of red dots can be seen on pink, elongated areas. These are placed around rock depressions, evoking, for many poeple, vulvas. Others ask, not without reason: But what do the rows of dots mean?

If that is the important question that the Chufín Cave is asking, then I venture a hypothesis: the red dots are evidence that Neanderthals did not simply disappear but left their mark on the aesthetic sensibilities of Cro-Magnon humans. They influenced their style. The red dots or discs could be a Neanderthal motif. Such abstract red formations in various Spanish caves have been dated to well over forty thousand years old; they could therefore originate from Neanderthals.5 And if we know that Neanderthals and Cro-Magnon people encountered and intermingled over thousands of years, why do we think that Neanderthals did not leave any aesthetic traces on the latter?* *

To be continued in Part 2. An earlier first version of this piece, in German, appeared in Republik, August 30, 2025 →.

Notes

1

J. Jaubert et al., “Early Neanderthal Constructions Deep in Bruniquel Cave in Southwestern France,” Nature, no. 534 (2016).

2

C. S. Henshilwood et al., “An Abstract Drawing from the 73,000-Year-Old Levels at Blombos Cave, South Africa,” Nature, no. 562 (2018).

3

M. Aubert et al., “Earliest Hunting Scene in Prehistoric Art,” Nature, no. 576 (2019); and A. A. Oktaviana, “Narrative Cave Art in Indonesia by 51,200 Years Ago,” Nature, no. 631 (2014).

4

D. A. Fordham et al., “Process-Explicit Models Reveal Pathway to Extinction for Woolly Mammoth Using Pattern-Oriented Validation,” Ecology Letters, no.* *25 (2022).

5

D. L. Hoffmann et al., “U-Th Dating of Carbonate Crusts Reveals Neandertal Origin of Iberian Cave Art,” *Science *359, no. 6378 (February 2018).

‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌