Avant-garde cave art
Paintings and animation date way back
By Bruce Bower
2012 SCIENCE NEWS TOP 25: 20
Someone was painting on the walls of European caves nearly 41,000 years ago, several thousand years before researchers had thought. The creators of many of those ancient drawings also used cartoon-like effects to make bison and other creatures appear as if they were moving across the walls. But who the artists were remains an open question.
Findings reported this year show that red disks, hand stencils and other drawings in several Spanish caves are of an age that Neandertals might have crafted them (SN: 7/28/12, p. 15).
But some researchers suspect that Homo sapiens, not Neandertals, were the artists. People could have started painting on cave walls as early as 45,000 years ago, either before or shortly after entering Europe. Many of the cave drawings in the study were made after Neandertals went extinct, the researchers reported, so they must have been created by people.