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 ...

Discovered in 2008, Manot cave has a long history of associations with both humans and Neanderthals. Existing research suggests the cave was inhabited from the Late Middle Paleolithic through to ...

The 1.6-kilometre (mile-long) cave has more than 1,000 carved figures, both animals and stylised feminine forms. Scientists ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

Cave art pigments show how ancient technology changed over 4500 years. ... but the bulk of archaeological material dates from a 4500-year-long period about 40,000 years ago. ... as time passed, ...

[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.

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.