What the Painted Caves Were For

The animals painted on cave walls thirty thousand years ago are not distributed as decoration would be. They cluster in chambers that are difficult to reach, sometimes hundreds of metres from daylight through passages a person must crawl along, and they are frequently absent from the wide entrance halls where people demonstrably lived. Whatever the paintings were for, they were not for looking at in passing.

[A] The favourite explanations have not worn well. [B] Hunting magic, the idea that painting an animal secured it, founders on the species chosen: the bones in the living areas are mostly reindeer, and the walls are dominated by horses, bison and lions. People were not painting what they ate. [C] A more cautious reading attends to the caves themselves. Several of the decorated chambers have unusual acoustics, and marks cluster where a sound is returned most strongly; some images use a bulge in the rock as the shoulder of an animal, so that a moving lamp appears to move the beast. [D] This suggests an event rather than an object, something performed in a particular place by a few people at a time. It also explains the awkwardness of the locations, which stops being a puzzle as soon as we stop assuming the paintings were meant to be seen by everyone.