cave art

American  

noun

1. paintings and engravings on the walls of caves and rock-shelters, especially naturalistic depictions of animals, produced by Upper Paleolithic peoples of western Europe between about 28,000 and 10,000 years ago.

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Etymology

Origin of cave art

First recorded in 1920–25

Example Sentences

See Examples For:

cave art

According to Nash, at the time of the cave art what is now the Bristol Channel was a "rich fertile plateau" between Gower and the north Devon coast.

From BBC ● Jun. 1, 2026

The hand stencil dates back at least 67,800 years, making it the oldest reliably dated cave art ever found.

From Science Daily ● Mar. 22, 2026

Haring made uninflected linear drawings almost exclusively glyphs and pictographs, like Paleolithic cave art with an agitated urban edge.

From Los Angeles Times ● Jun. 6, 2023

In a cave on the island of Borneo containing some of the earliest known cave art made by our species, scientists have uncovered evidence of a surgical amputation from about 31,000 years ago.

From Science Magazine ● Sep. 7, 2022

Apart from large-scale cave art, the people of the Upper Paleolithic also produced small, hand-sized drawings and carvings in bone, horn, or stone, skillfully cut by means of flint tools.

From "History of Art, Volume 1" by H.W. Janson