Cro-Magnon paintings

Cro-Magnon was a member of the same species of Homo sapiens as present day man.  Evidence form skeleton remains, tools and weapons show the he was a hunter and fisherman of skill that he lived in caves and huts.

Over the period of 20,000 years, Cro-Magnon artists in Europe worked to produce galleries of art that still astonish modern people. The European paintings are found deep an inside cave is what is modern Spain and France.

The oldest known cave, Grotte de Chauvet is among the most spectacular of all Cro-Magnon painted caves.

It was painted 33,000 years ago and exhibited as advanced an artistic capacity as any of the later caves.

The artists who painted its wall had a sophisticated understanding of perspective and other artistic principles, so much so that the experts first assumed that the paintings were executed less than eighteen thousands years ago, during what was then thought to be the heyday of Cro-Magnon art.

The most frequently painted subjects were animals, pictures in browns, reds, yellows, and blacks for pigments available to the Stone Age artists.

The animals were the games for which Cro-Magnon hunters looked: reindeer, bison, cattle, deer and horses. Many of the animals depicted, such as bison and rhinoceroses, have been extinct in Western Europe for many thousands of years.
Cro-Magnon paintings

The World’s Oldest Paintings

The World’s Oldest Paintings
One of the most spectacular archeological finds of the past century came to light in December 1994 at Vallon-Pont-d’Arc, France and was announced at a press conference in Paris on January 18, 1995.

Unlike some other recent “finds” of prehistoric art that proved to be forgeries, the paintings in the Chauvet Cave (named after the leader of the exploration team, Jean-Marie Chauvet) seemed to be authentic.

But no one, including Chauvet and his colleagues, guesses at the time of their discovery that radiocarbon dating (a measure of the rate degeneration of carbon 14 in organic materials) of the paintings might establish that the murals in cave were more than 15,000 years older than those at Altamira.

When the scientific tests were completed, the French archeologists announced that the Chauvet Cave painting were the oldest yet found anywhere, datable around 30,000-28,000 BCE.

The Chauvet Cave or is located in the Ardèche département, southern France.

It became famous in 1994 after a trio of speleologists found that its walls were richly decorated with Paleolithic artwork, that it contained the fossilized remains of many animals, including those that are now extinct, and that the floor preserved the footprints of animals and humans.
The World’s Oldest Paintings