Messages from the Deep

Cave paintings are humanity's first surviving creative act, and they raise more questions than they answer:

• Many are in spots that required dangerous crawls through total darkness, implying ritual significance
• Hand stencils appear on every inhabited continent, hinting at a universal human impulse
• Finger-length analysis suggests many of the painters may have been women

Forty thousand years ago, a person mixed pigment, crawled into absolute darkness, and painted an animal they had watched and studied.