Paintings and engravings made on cave walls during the Ice Age — mostly large wild animals, with human handprints, rendered in ochre, charcoal, and mineral pigments deep in underground chambers. The finest examples, at Chauvet, Lascaux, Altamira, and Sulawesi, show genuine mastery of shading and movement. Their purpose remains genuinely unknown. Newer dating has dismantled the old story that image-making began in Ice Age Europe: the oldest known figurative paintings are now in Indonesia, and contested marks in Spain have been attributed to Neanderthals.
Deep inside a French cave called Chauvet, on a wall reachable only through darkness, a herd of horses surges across the stone. The artist used the rock's bulges to swell a horse's neck and smudged charcoal to soften its muzzle into shadow. These animals were painted roughly 36,000 years ago, by people with no writing, no cities, and no metal. They are among the oldest images our species ever made, and they are astonishing in skill. They are also completely silent. We do not know why a single one of them was painted, and we may never know why.