Cave Paintings

Cave Paintings

Cave paintings are the oldest art in the world. It’s thought that some of them are 64,000 years old! The oldest that we can confirm from scientific dating are from at least 41,000 years ago. They can be found all over the world, on every continent except Antarctica. Some of the places they have been found are France, Indonesia, Spain, the United States, Romania, Russia, and England. It’s fascinating that all these people from all around the world, in different cultures and locations, all created art!

Extinct Animals

Many of these paintings depicted animals, some of which have been extinct for a long time. Scientists were able to learn when some of these animals lived because of these paintings. The painters would make art of the creatures they saw in their daily lives. Some of the animals they painted included the woolly mammoth, the woolly rhinocerous, the Eurasian wild horse, the Irish elk, the moa, the auroch, the Eurasian cave lion, and the cavebear.

Some Cave Paintings Took a Long Time

Some cave paintings were made by many people over the course of a thousand years. Unlike paintings now, which are usually done by one person, these paintings had additions made over time by different people, showing events, people, and animals.

PALEOLITHIC PAINTERS USED MATERIALS THEY HAD

The painters of the Stone Age couldn’t go to C.C. Lowell, Michaels, or Blick to grab paints and paper. They had to use what was around them. They used the walls of the caves they lived in as their palettes, and they used things like charcoal from their fires, ground up colorful stones, and plant material for their paints.

You can do it, too!

Try mixing up white poster paint with different spices like turmeric, cumin, cinnamon, paprika, and safflower to make different colors (it takes quite a bit of spice to make a color, like a quarter of a normal spice bottle per about a half cup of paint). Mix the paint in jars or cups and let them sit for a little while to let the colors set. Then you can paint on paper bags to replica the cave wall. Make hand prints, or paint animals. You can also add some chalk drawings as well, sort of like Paleolithic mixed media. Just a warning, though, these paints will smell spicy, so you might get hungry!