Chauvet Cave: early masterworks of figurative cave art

Date

c. 36,500 years ago

Category

Culture, arts & philosophy

Region

Southern France (Ardèche)

Era

Prehistory

Significance

In the Ardèche valley of southern France, artists of the Aurignacian produced one of the earliest and most sophisticated bodies of figurative art known.

The Chauvet-Pont-d'Arc Cave, discovered in 1994 and sealed by a rockfall for tens of thousands of years, preserves hundreds of animal images dominated by dangerous predators and large game — cave lions, woolly rhinoceroses, mammoths, bears, and horses — rendered with shading, perspective, and a sense of movement. Radiocarbon dating of charcoal drawings and torch marks, recalibrated in 2020, places the oldest paintings at roughly 36,500 years ago, with a second phase of use millennia later. Some compositions appear to depict animal behaviour, such as fighting rhinoceroses and a stalking pride of lions, suggesting deliberate narrative scenes. Chauvet overturned the assumption that Palaeolithic art evolved slowly from crude beginnings, showing instead that fully accomplished representation was present near the very start of the European Upper Palaeolithic.

Related culture, arts & philosophy events

• Behavioural modernity and major Out-of-Africa dispersal
  c. 70,000–50,000 years ago
• Göbekli Tepe – monumental architecture by hunter-gatherers
  c. 9,600–8,000 BCE
• Upper Paleolithic art and symbolic explosion
  c. 40,000+ years ago
• World's earliest figurative and narrative cave art on Sulawesi
  c. 51,000 – 45,500 years ago
• Earliest Indus Script Signs Appear at Harappa
  c. 3300 BCE
• Earliest musical instruments: Ice Age bone flutes
  c. 43,000–40,000 years ago

Also relevant

• The Gravettian Venus figurines (Willendorf and beyond)
  c. 30,000–25,000 years ago
• Yangshao painted pottery and Yellow River farming villages
  c. 5000 – 3000 BCE

Further reading

The Story of Art

The wider story

The Story of Art

E. H. Gombrich

The best-selling art history ever written, from cave paintings to the modern age.

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