Prehistoric Cave Art

“A cave in southern France dubbed the ‘prehistoric Sistine Chapel’ has been added to Unesco’s World Heritage list.

The 1,000 drawings carved in the walls of the Decorated Cave of Pont d’Arc, or Grotte Chauvet, are 36,000 years old and include mammoths and hand prints.

Cave experts only discovered it in 1994 as the entrance had been concealed by a rockfall 23,000 years earlier.”

— ‘”Prehistoric Sistine Chapel’ gets world heritage status,” BBC News

More:

“The Vallon-Pont-d’Arc cave: The world’s oldest decorated cave,” The Vallon Pont-d’Arc Cave Project

“La Grotte ornée Chauvet-Pont d’Arc,” UNESCO World Heritage Centre

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The First Painters Were Cave Women

Penn State Professor Dean R. Snow has discovered strong evidence that most early cave painters were women. Dr. Snow measured hand stencils artists traced on painted walls at cave sites in France and Spain and concluded that three-quarters of these were made by women and not men, as had been previously assumed.

More:

“Were the First Artists Mostly Women?” Virginia Hughes, National Geographic News

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Cave Paintings, Cartoons, & Neanderthals

Using advanced techniques, scientists have determined that cave paintings in northern Spain are 40,800 years old, the oldest wall paintings in the world. The paintings may predate the arrival of Homo sapiens in Europe, meaning the ancient cave artists may have been Neanderthals, modern man’s older cousins.

If Neanderthals were early Michelangelos, French cavemen may have been Stone Age Walt Disneys. Marc Azéma of the University of Toulouse–Le Mirail  and artist Florent Rivère theorize that 30,000 years ago, cave artists took advantage of the strobe effect of flickering firelight by drawing series of slightly different images to create an illusion of movement, the first animations. The phenomenon of retinal persistence is what makes it work.

Shocking New Discovery of Oldest Cave Art

Scientists have determined that a big block of rock in southern France is engraved with the earliest example of prehistoric wall art. Research indicates that the limestone carving is 37,000 years old and shows what Early Aurignacian human artists were thinking about.

The carvings are of prehistoric lady bits. This is important for art historians and huge news for standup comic/archeologists.

More:

“Engravings of Female Genitalia May Be World’s Oldest Cave Art,” Michael Balter, ScienceNOW

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