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I thought the cave art at Lascaux was just hunting scenes until I actually looked at the aurochs
I used to nod along with the popular take that paleolithic cave paintings were basically ancient hunting magazines, but then I spent an afternoon going through the Hall of Bulls at Lascaux and noticed something off. About 60 percent of the animals drawn there are aurochs, horses, and stags, and almost none of them show spears or wounds, which doesn't fit the hunting scene story at all. The bison at Altamira is the same deal, just standing there, no hunters anywhere. So if these weren't kill records, what were they actually for?
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emma_perry11d ago
One small thing to fix: those animals aren't all just standing around. A lot of the Lascaux figures are overlapping, and some have lines that look like spears or arrows near them, it's just harder to spot because the paint faded or the artist layered them. The "no wounds" idea mostly comes from the ones we can still see clearly, not the whole panel. There's also a good chance these were tied to rituals or telling stories about the animals, not a scoreboard of kills.
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