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cave art

American

noun

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.

Etymology

Origin of cave art

First recorded in 1920–25

Example Sentences

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cave art

Around the world, volunteers have helped monitor bird populations, rediscover lost species, and even uncover ancient writing systems through cave art.

From Science Daily ● Jul. 12, 2026

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 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.

From New York Times ● Feb. 14, 2024

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

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

Definitions and idiom definitions from Dictionary.com Unabridged, based on the Random House Unabridged Dictionary, © Random House, Inc. 2023