For decades researchers thought that the cave art was made during the ... minimum dates of rock art in Western Europe. First they scoured the caves for images that had small cauliflower-like ...

Universal Images Group / Getty Images But experts ... By contrast, the gorgeous animal cave paintings in Europe represent a consistent tradition. The seeds of artistic creativity may have been ...

Long before Picasso, ancient artists in what is now Spain were making creative works of their own, mixing pigments, crafting beads out of seashells, and painting murals on cave walls. The twist?

They are most common in Gargas cave, where 114 of the 231 hand images are missing at least ... the positive handprints in prehistoric European cave art – made by daubing the hand with paint ...

But says Zilhão, “We don’t know if European cave art arrived ... proved that these are their paintings, Neanderthals thought, since painting involves using images to convey meanings ...

While most cave art discovered so far is in Europe, examples have been found on every continent ... However, in some caves, particularly the Chauvet cave in southern France, the images feature cave ...

The paintings are older than Europe’s famed cave art such as Lascaux in France ... The painter or painters are “conveying more information about images than just individual static images.