Cave painting

Cave painting is a genre of painting in which rock paintings were applied to the walls of caves or abris. Such paintings on rock walls inside and outside caves are called parietal art (French art pariétal "art belonging to the wall", from Latin paries "wall"). European cave paintings mostly date from the Upper Paleolithic, by anatomically modern humans (Cro-Magnon man).

In 2021, an image of a life-size Sulawesi pustel pig in Leang Tedongnge Cave, a cave in the Maros-Pangkep Karst in Sulawesi, Indonesia, was dated to be at least 45,500 years old using uranium-thorium dating. As such, this image is currently considered the oldest known cave painting in the world. On a rock wall in the cave of Leang Bulu' Sipong, also a cave in the Maros-Pangkep Karst, there are depictions of several animals and animal-human mixed creatures (therianthropes), executed with dark red pigment. The age of these paintings - also based on a uranium-thorium dating - is given as at least 43,900 years; they are thus the oldest paintings depicting humans.

The oldest cave paintings in Europe are found in the Spanish El Castillo Cave (c. 40,000 years BP, early Aurignacian) and in the collapsed Abri Castanet in France (Dordogne department). The paintings from Chauvet Cave (Ardèche département) are dated to about 32,000 years old, and the petroglyphs from Pair-non-Pair Cave (Gironde département) to about 30,000 years old. Cave painting reached its peak of European diffusion during the Upper Paleolithic periods of Gravettian, Solutréen, and Magdalenian in central and southern France and northern Spain (see Franco-Cantabrian cave art). In some parts of the world, for example in South Africa and Australia, the painting of caves is attested to the present day (see list of sites).

Age Determination

Cave paintings can be dated in various ways. With all dating methods, however, a certain degree of uncertainty must be reckoned with. Absolute dating (direct dating) is the dating of colour pigments such as charcoal, with the aim of giving an absolute date. The age of cave paintings can be determined using a variant of radiocarbon dating (AMS dating), which requires only a few milligrams of charcoal or organic paint application of the work. Since 2012, uranium-thorium dating has also been used to determine the age of sinter deposits on cave paintings. The minimum age of the cave painting or engraving can be determined very accurately with this method. Relative dating (indirect dating) is the method of relating paintings to archaeological horizons and excavated finds. This method is unreliable because a wall painting can also have been created earlier or later than a soil layer or objects found in it.

Other methods of relative dating are:

• the style analysis (see Art Styles by André Leroi-Gourhan),
• the creation of a chronological order based on the overlays of lines,
• the analysis of the spatial arrangement of the paintings, from which a chronological order can be deduced if necessary.

Interpretation

Various interpretative approaches have developed in research (only a selection is presented here). The interpretations contain strongly speculative aspects and can be combined with each other.

Religion

According to rock art researcher Jean Clottes, "People painted and engraved in caves at that time because of their faith. Most likely, they simply believed that the underground world was a supernatural world. In the caves they believed to meet spirits, gods, their ancestors, deceased people. The images were meant to serve as mediators between the world here and the world beyond." According to Clottes, prehistoric art is part of a shamanistic religion. It is possible that the caves were also a place for initiation rites, and according to an earlier view, now considered outdated, also for hunting magic.

Purposeless painting

The cave art can be understood as a natural reaction to the environment. The Cro-Magnon people could have processed what they had experienced, their dreams and desires in the pictures. Perhaps they simply wanted to represent what they had seen.

Practical purposes

The paintings may have served as symbolic language to record experiences with game, hunting techniques, or animal migration routes. They may also have served as a demonstration that one was in this cave.

Artistic expression

Some cave paintings are understood as art in a sense close to today's concept of art. This interpretation is controversial. Steven Mithen points out that some of today's primitive peoples practice rock painting without having a word for "art" in their vocabulary.