Cave and rock art
The oldest pictures people made: the painted caves of Lascaux, Chauvet and Altamira, hand stencils, carved figurines, petroglyphs, and the signs painted beside them.
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Also in: Ancient symbols
Painted caves
- Lascaux cave paintingsHundreds of painted and engraved animals, horses above all, on the walls of Lascaux, a cave above Montignac in the Dordogne, France. They were made more than 20,000 years ago and found by four teenagers in 1940. The cave has been closed to the public since 1963.
- Chauvet CaveA cave above the Ardèche river in southern France with more than 1,000 paintings and engravings, many of them lions, mammoths and rhinoceroses, made from about 36,000 years ago. Found in 1994, it has never been opened to the public.
- Altamira CaveA cave near Santillana del Mar in Cantabria, northern Spain, known for the bison painted in red and black on the ceiling of its Polychrome Room. Found in 1879, it was the first cave in which Ice Age painting was recognised, and the experts of the day refused to believe it for more than twenty years.
- Cueva de las Manos (hand stencils)A rock shelter high above the Pinturas river canyon in Santa Cruz, Argentine Patagonia, its walls crowded with more than 800 stencilled hands beside paintings of guanacos and hunts. People painted here for some 8,000 years, from about 9,300 years ago until about 1,300 years ago.
- Cave art signsThe dots, lines, grids, zigzags, hands and other non-figurative marks painted and engraved in Ice Age caves, often beside the animals. Genevieve von Petzinger counts 32 signs repeated across Europe over some 30,000 years. What they meant is not known.
Carvings
- Venus of WillendorfA limestone figure of a woman, 11 centimetres tall, carved about 29,500 years ago and found at Willendorf in Austria in 1908. She is in the Natural History Museum Vienna. “Venus” is a nineteenth-century label; what the figure meant to the people who made it is not known.
- Lion ManA figure carved from mammoth ivory about 40,000 years ago, with the head of a cave lion on an upright body with human legs. About 30 centimetres tall, it was found in pieces in Hohlenstein-Stadel cave in southern Germany in 1939 and is in the Museum Ulm. It is one of the oldest known figures of a creature that does not exist.
- PetroglyphsImages pecked, carved or scratched into rock. Pictographs, by contrast, are painted onto it. In the American Southwest most petroglyphs were made by the ancestors of today’s Pueblo peoples and other tribes, who regard them as part of their living heritage; at Petroglyph National Monument in New Mexico there are more than 20,000.
About cave and rock art
The oldest pictures people made have survived where the weather could not reach them: deep in limestone caves, under rock overhangs and cut into stone. These pages follow the best known. Lascaux, in the Dordogne, has some 600 painted and engraved animals. Chauvet, in the Ardèche, was sealed by a rock fall about 20,000 years ago and holds lions, mammoths and rhinoceroses painted from about 36,500 years ago. Altamira, in Cantabria, was the first cave in which Ice Age painting was recognised, in 1879. The stencilled hands of the Cueva de las Manos in Patagonia were made over some 8,000 years, and the signs painted beside the animals of Ice Age Europe are a study of their own. Two carvings stand beside the paintings: the Venus of Willendorf, a limestone woman 11 centimetres tall, and the Lion Man, a lion-headed figure of mammoth ivory carved about 40,000 years ago. Petroglyphs, images pecked into rock, include the thousands at Petroglyph National Monument in New Mexico, most of them made by the ancestors of living Pueblo peoples.
What the caves show, and what they leave out
France’s Ministry of Culture sums up the subjects of Ice Age cave art as three: animals, human figures and signs. There are no landscapes and no plants, and the animals are the ones the painters knew, not a menu of what they ate; at Chauvet nearly two-thirds of the identifiable animals are mammoths, felines, rhinoceroses and bears. People seldom appear whole, and a cave with more than one human figure is rare. Far more often a person is present as a hand, printed or stencilled on the rock.
How old the oldest are
The dates keep moving back. In 2012 a team led by Pike dated the calcite grown over a red disk at El Castillo in Spain to at least 40,800 years ago. In 2026 a team led by Oktaviana dated calcite over a hand stencil on Muna Island in Sulawesi, Indonesia, to at least 67,800 years ago, the oldest minimum age yet for cave art. Between the two sits a claim made in 2018 by Hoffmann and colleagues that paintings in three Spanish caves are more than 64,800 years old and so the work of Neanderthals. Slimak and colleagues argued that the evidence points to about 47,000 years instead, and the question remains open.
Whose art it is
The painted caves of Ice Age Europe are protected by the states they lie in, and most are closed to visitors: Lascaux since 1963, Chauvet since it was found, and Altamira to all but five people a week. Other rock images belong to living peoples. Petroglyphs in New Mexico are, for the National Park Service, more than art: it says American Indian tribes consider the images and the land within the monument a sacred space, and that the petroglyphs’ deepest meanings are closely guarded by today’s Native peoples.
Sources
- Themes (Lascaux, Ministère de la Culture), Ministère de la Culture, Lascaux: “Themes”, Ministère de la Culture (France), Parietal art › Themes
- Decorated Cave of Pont d’Arc, known as Grotte Chauvet-Pont d’Arc (UNESCO), UNESCO World Heritage List, property 1426, “Decorated Cave of Pont d’Arc, known as Grotte Chauvet-Pont d’Arc, Ardèche”, UNESCO World Heritage Centre, Description
- Aurignacian cave art (Chauvet, Ministère de la Culture), Ministère de la Culture, Chauvet cave: “Aurignacian cave art”, Ministère de la Culture (France), Research › Aurignacian cave art
- Cave of Altamira and Paleolithic Cave Art of Northern Spain (UNESCO), UNESCO World Heritage List, property 310, “Cave of Altamira and Paleolithic Cave Art of Northern Spain”, UNESCO World Heritage Centre, Brief synthesis
- Cueva de las Manos (INAPL), Instituto Nacional de Antropología y Pensamiento Latinoamericano, “Cueva de las Manos” (news, December 2023), Instituto Nacional de Antropología y Pensamiento Latinoamericano (Ministerio de Cultura, Argentina), news item
- Venus research (Naturhistorisches Museum Wien), Naturhistorisches Museum Wien, Prehistory Department, “Venus research”, Naturhistorisches Museum Wien, research page
- Archaeology collection: the Lion Man (Museum Ulm), Museum Ulm, “Archaeology” (collections), Museum Ulm, collection page
- Definitions (Petroglyph National Monument), National Park Service, Petroglyph National Monument, “Definitions”, U.S. National Park Service, Plan your visit › Definitions
- New Mexico: Petroglyph National Monument (National Park Service), National Park Service, “New Mexico: Petroglyph National Monument” (travel itinerary article), U.S. National Park Service, article
- U-series dating of Paleolithic art in 11 caves in Spain (Pike et al., Science 2012), A. W. G. Pike, D. L. Hoffmann, M. García-Diez et al., “U-series dating of Paleolithic art in 11 caves in Spain”, Science 336 (2012): 1409–1413, Science (AAAS), abstract (Europe PMC record)
- Rock art from at least 67,800 years ago in Sulawesi (Oktaviana et al., Nature 2026), A. A. Oktaviana, R. Joannes-Boyau, B. Hakim et al., “Rock art from at least 67,800 years ago in Sulawesi”, Nature 650 (2026): 652–656, Nature, abstract (Europe PMC record)
- U-Th dating of carbonate crusts reveals Neandertal origin of Iberian cave art (Hoffmann et al., Science 2018), D. L. Hoffmann, C. D. Standish, M. García-Diez et al., “U-Th dating of carbonate crusts reveals Neandertal origin of Iberian cave art”, Science 359 (2018): 912–915, Science (AAAS), abstract (Europe PMC record)
- Comment on Hoffmann et al. (Slimak et al., Science 2018), L. Slimak, J. Fietzke, J.-M. Geneste and R. Ontañón, “Comment on ‘U-Th dating of carbonate crusts reveals Neandertal origin of Iberian cave art’”, Science 361 (2018): eaau1371, Science (AAAS), abstract (Europe PMC record)
- Conservation (Museo de Altamira), Museo Nacional y Centro de Investigación de Altamira, “Conservation”, Museo Nacional y Centro de Investigación de Altamira (Ministerio de Cultura, Spain), The cave › Conservation
- Prehistoric Sites and Decorated Caves of the Vézère Valley (UNESCO), UNESCO World Heritage List, property 85, “Prehistoric Sites and Decorated Caves of the Vézère Valley”, UNESCO World Heritage Centre, Authenticity
- Original preservation (Chauvet, Ministère de la Culture), Ministère de la Culture, Chauvet cave: “Original preservation”, Ministère de la Culture (France), Preservation
Researched, edited and approved by Rory Hansen before publishing. Last reviewed October 8, 2026. How we research