cave art

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.

Word History and Origins

Origin of cave art¹

First recorded in 1920–25

Example Sentences

The cave art provides a rare glimpse of a culture that may have relied on this design to communicate valuable insights across generations during a period of climactic shifts.

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During this period, new cultural elements emerged in various realms, including tool technology, food acquisition, seafaring, and artistic expression in ornaments and cave art.

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If so, the pendant would predate cave art at Grotte Chauvet in France that depicts vulvas and dates back 32,000 years.

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

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“The whole thing is unconvincing,” says archaeologist João Zilhão of the University of Barcelona, who has proposed that Neanderthals made early cave art.

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