The Oldest Art

The cave paintings at Lascaux (France, around 17,000 years ago) and Altamira (Spain, around 15,000 years ago) show animals — horses, bison, aurochs, deer — rendered with astonishing accuracy and movement. Some figures use the natural curves of the rock as part of the body, as if the artists saw the animal in the stone and pulled it out.

But these aren't the oldest. In 2024, researchers dated a Sulawesi cave scene at Leang Karampuang, Indonesia, to at least 51,200 years ago, making it the oldest known reliably dated figurative cave art and the earliest known narrative image. Cave art wasn't a European invention — it appears to have emerged independently on multiple continents.