Carve Out the Answers to This Prehistoric Art Quiz

The Altamira caves in northern Spain were first found by amateur archaeologist Marcelino Sanz de Sautuola in 1875. Over the next few years, he explored the caves further, discovering walls covered with well-preserved paintings of bison and horses. At the time, the idea that prehistoric people could have made art was controversial, and these paintings were originally dismissed as a forgery.

The remote Cave of Swimmers in the Al Wahat Al Dakhla Desert in Egypt features in the 1996 film “The English Patient.” The film, based on a book of the same name by Michael Ondaatje, reimagines the cave’s discovery by real-life Hungarian explorer László Almásy. Almásy found the cave in an extremely remote part of the desert and was amazed to see paintings that looked like swimming figures.

Dating to the Ice Age some 40,000 years ago, the Lion Man figurine is the oldest known artwork depicting an imagined being, and it provides the earliest evidence of religious belief. Found in a cave in Germany in 1939, the figurine has the head of a lion but stands upright like a man. Archaeologists speculate that it might have been a sacred or mythical object that was passed around as people sat around a fire.

The Venus of Hohle Fels is a tiny figurine depicting a female body, carved out of mammoth ivory. It was discovered in a cave in Germany’s Swabian Jura region. The caves were occupied about 43,000 to 33,000 years ago and are thought to be some of the earliest inhabited caves in Europe. This intricate Ice Age figurine helps cast some light on the origins of human artistic expression.

The world’s oldest known cave painting of an animal was recently discovered in Sulawesi, Indonesia. The painting, believed to have been created 45,500 years ago, depicts a wild warty pig. The life-size pig was painted using a red ochre pigment and is thought to have survived due to its remote location. It provides the earliest known evidence of human settlement in the region.

Prehistoric peoples used a variety of natural pigments to make colorful paintings. They used minerals, crushed shells, clays, charcoal, and even bat guano to create different hues. These were then crushed on stones and mixed with water to form a paste. Notably, the colors blue and green have rarely been found in cave paintings, possibly reflecting the difficulty in finding pigments in these shades. Verdigris is a blue-green hue that forms from copper, brass, or bronze after prolonged exposure to air. It was first used in antiquity and the Middle Ages.

Today, most Aboriginal Australian rock paintings appear to be predominantly red, because the red pigment they used, haematite, survives the longest. One of the most famous Aboriginal cave art sites is found in Kakadu National Park. Prehistoric peoples crushed pigments on stone palettes and mixed them with water to make paint, using human hair, feathers, or crushed sticks as paint brushes.

The Cueva de las Manos (Cave of the Hands) in Patagonia provides one of the most striking and recognizable examples of prehistoric cave art. The walls are covered with stenciled human hands that date to around 5000 BCE. Archaeologists think the stencils were created by artists blowing pigment over their hands through pipes made of bone. The cave was designated a UNESCO World Heritage site in 1999.

Rock art is one of the earliest forms of artistic expression, dating back at least 73,000 years. Petroglyphs — pictures carved into rock — are the most frequently found type of rock art. The word petroglyph comes from the Greek "petra," meaning “stone,” and "glyphein," meaning “to carve.” Other forms of ancient rock art include pictographs, or paintings created with natural pigments.

The cave complex at Lascaux contains over 600 painted or drawn animals. The most frequently depicted is the horse, which appears 364 times. There are also bison, felines, birds, and a rhinoceros. Lascaux represents one of the best examples of Upper Paleolithic art. The caves were closed to the public in 1963 after artificial lights damaged the paintings, but today tourists can visit a replica.