A prehistoric painting in Indonesia has been dated to at least 51,200 years ago, making it the earliest known example of "figurative" cave art in the world and perhaps the oldest known surviving ...

Boomerangs are some of humanity’s oldest tools. In the northernmost region of Australia, 50,000-year-old cave art appears to ...

Oldest Known Neanderthal Engravings Were Sealed in a Cave for 57,000 Years The art was created long before modern humans inhabited France’s Loire Valley ...

Whether the art depicts a hunt or some other event, it’s likely the oldest known story told through pictures, the researchers say. The mural dates back at least 44,000 years, which makes it ...

Previous research had pegged the time of its construction to around 3,500-3,000 years ago. But now experts believe that it ...

Between 17,000 and 12,000 years ago, unnamed artists covered the extensive Lascaux cave system in France’s Dordogne region with hundreds of paintings of animals and abstract shapes. The ...

The Lascaux cave paintings are some of the most recognizable cave art. They were found in the Dordogne region of France in 1940 by four teenagers. The art, which is thought to have been made around 20 ...

Then, around 10,000 years ago, the area became more arid and hostile as a result of climatic shifts. The archaeological record in the cave likewise dried up for the next several thousand years ...

For a long time, archaeologists thought only H. sapiens were intellectually developed enough to make, use and appreciate art, which they tended to equate with symbolism.

[Related: Neanderthals were likely creating art 57,000 years ago. The team dates the drawings to between 1670 to 1830 CE, which corresponds with a time of increasing conflict in the region .

As the earliest examples of surviving figurative art, cave paintings have been a source of ongoing fascination for the clues they might provide about long-lost civilizations.