Chauvet Cave
36000 BCE – 21000 BCE
The oldest known and best-preserved figurative cave art on Earth — over a thousand painted and engraved images of lions, rhinoceroses, mammoths, and bears created some 36,000 to 28,000 years ago in a cave sealed by a rockfall roughly 21,000 years ago and rediscovered only in 1994. Its sophistication, including shading, perspective, and dynamic depictions of animal movement, predates Lascaux by more than fifteen thousand years and overturned assumptions about how gradually artistic technique developed among early Homo sapiens.
31
