There is something magically attractive and at the same time sad about petroglyphs. Names talented artists we will never know antiquity and their history. All that remains for us are rock paintings, from which we can try to imagine the life of our distant ancestors. Let's take a look at 9 famous caves with rock paintings.
Altamira Cave
Discovered in 1879 by Marcelino de Sautola in Spain, it is not without reason called Sistine Chapel primitive art. The impressionists began to use techniques that were in service with ancient artists in their work only in the 19th century.
The painting, discovered by the daughter of an amateur archaeologist, caused a lot of noise in the scientific community. The researcher was even accused of falsification - no one could believe that such talented drawings were created thousands of years ago.
The paintings are made realistically, some of them are three-dimensional - a special effect was achieved using the natural relief of the walls.
After the opening, everyone could visit the cave. Due to the constant visits of tourists, the temperature inside has changed, and mold has appeared on the drawings. Today the cave is closed to visitors, but there is a Museum nearby ancient history and archaeology. Just 30 km from the Altamira Cave you can see copies of rock paintings and interesting finds of archaeologists.
Lascaux Cave
In 1940, a group of teenagers accidentally discovered a cave near Montillac in France, the entrance to which was opened by a tree that fell during a thunderstorm. It is small, but under the arches there are thousands of drawings. Ancient artists began painting some of them on walls back in the 18th century BC.
It depicts people, symbols and in motion. The researchers divided the cave into thematic zones for convenience. Far beyond the borders of France, drawings of the Hall of the Bulls are known; its other name is the Rotunda. Here is the largest rock painting ever discovered - a 5-meter bull.
Under the vaults there are more than 300 drawings, including animals here. ice age. It is believed that the age of some paintings is about 30 thousand years.
Nio Cave
In the southeast of France is located, about the painting inside of which local residents knew back in the 17th century. However, they did not attach due importance to the drawings, leaving numerous inscriptions nearby.
In 1906, Captain Molyar discovered a hall with images of animals inside, which later became known as the Black Salon.
Inside you can see bison, deer and goats. Scientists believe that in ancient times rituals were performed here to attract good luck in hunting. The Pyrenees Park of Prehistoric Art is open to tourists near Nio, where you can learn more about archaeology.
Koske Cave
It is located not far from Marseille, and can only be accessed by those who can swim well. To see the ancient images, you need to swim through a 137-meter tunnel located deep underwater. Opened unusual place in 1985 by diver Henri Cosquet. Scientists believe that some of the images of animals and birds found inside were made 29 thousand years ago.
Kapova Cave (Shulgan-Tash)
Cueva de las Manos cave
An ancient painting was also discovered in the south of Argentina in 1941. There is not just one cave, but a whole series, the total length of which is 160 km. The most famous of them is Cueva de las Manos. Its name is translated into Russian as "".
Inside there are many images of human palms - our ancestors made prints on the walls with their left hands. In addition, here you can see hunting scenes and ancient inscriptions. The images were taken between 9 and 13 thousand years ago.
Caves of Nerja
The Nerja Caves are located 5 km from the city of the same name in Spain. The cave paintings were discovered by accident by teenagers, as happened earlier in the Lascaux cave. Five guys went to catch bats, but accidentally saw a hole in the rock, looked inside and discovered a corridor with stalagmites and stalactites. The find interested scientists.
The cave turned out to be of impressive size - 35,484 square meters, which is equivalent to five football fields. The fact that people lived in it is evidenced by many finds: tools, traces of a hearth, ceramics. There are three halls downstairs. The hall of ghosts scares guests with unusual sounds and strange shapes. The waterfall hall was equipped for concert hall, it can accommodate 100 spectators at the same time.
Montserrat Caballe, Maya Plisetskaya and others performed here famous artists. The Bethlehem Hall amazes with its bizarre columns with stalactites and stalagmites. Rock paintings can be seen in the Hall of Spears and the Hall of Mountains.
Before the discovery of this cave, scientists assumed that the most ancient drawings were in the Chauvet Cave. According to recent research, our distant ancestors began to engage in creativity even earlier than we thought modern science. The results of radiocarbon dating showed that six images of seals and fur seals were made presumably 43 thousand years ago - accordingly, they are even older than the cave paintings discovered at Chauvet. However, it is too early to draw conclusions.
Magura Cave
The images in all these caves and the methods of drawing are completely different. However, there is also common features. Artists of ancient times conveyed their perception of the world through creativity and shared their outlook on life, but they did it not with words, but with drawings.
For many years, modern civilization had no idea about any objects ancient painting, however, in 1879, amateur archaeologist Marcelino Sanz de Sautuola, together with his 9-year-old daughter, during a walk, accidentally stumbled upon the Altamira cave, the arches of which were decorated with many drawings of ancient people - the unparalleled find greatly shocked the researcher and prompted him to pay close attention to it studying. A year later, Sautuola, together with his friend Juan Vilanova y Pierre from the University of Madrid, published the results of their research, which dated the execution of the drawings to the Paleolithic era. Many scientists perceived this message extremely ambiguously; Sautuola was accused of falsifying the finds, but later similar caves were discovered in many other parts of the planet.
Rock paintings in the Altamira cave
Pablo Picasso, visiting the Altamira cave, exclaimed: “after the work in Altamira, all art began to decline.” He wasn't joking. The art in this cave and in many other caves that are found in France, Spain and other countries is among the greatest artistic treasures that have ever been created.
Magura Cave
Magura Cave is one of the largest caves in Bulgaria. It is located in the northwestern part of the country. The cave walls are decorated with prehistoric cave paintings created approximately 8,000 to 4,000 years ago. More than 700 drawings were discovered. The drawings depict hunters, dancing people and many animals.
Cueva de las Manos - "Cave of Hands".
Cueva de las Manos is located in Southern Argentina. The name can be literally translated as “Cave of Hands”. Most of the images in the cave are left hands, but there are also hunting scenes and images of animals. The paintings are believed to have been created between 13,000 and 9,500 years ago.
Bhimbetka.
Bhimbetka is located in central India and contains over 600 prehistoric rock paintings. The drawings depict people living in the cave at that time. The animals were also given a lot of space. Images of bison, tigers, lions and crocodiles were found. It is believed that the most old picture 12,000 years.
Serra da Capivara
Serra da Capivara is a national park in northeastern Brazil. This place is home to many rock shelters, which are decorated with rock paintings that represent ritual scenes, hunting, trees, animals. Some scientists believe that the oldest rock art in this park is from 25,000 years ago.
Prehistoric rock art in Laas Gaal
Laas Gaal is a complex of caves in northwestern Somalia that contain some of the earliest known art on the African continent. Prehistoric cave paintings are estimated by scientists to be between 11,000 and 5,000 years old. They show cows, ceremonially dressed people, domestic dogs and even giraffes.
Drawing of a giraffe in Tadrart Akakus.
Tadrart Akakus forms mountain range in the Sahara Desert, western Libya. The area is famous for its rock art dating back to 12,000 BC. up to 100 years. The paintings reflect the changing conditions of the Sahara Desert. 9,000 years ago, the surrounding area was full of greenery and lakes, forests and wild animals, as evidenced by rock paintings depicting giraffes, elephants and ostriches.
Drawing of a bear in Chauvet Cave
Chauvet Cave, in the south of France, contains some of the earliest known prehistoric cave paintings in the world. The images preserved in this cave may be about 32,000 years old. The cave was discovered in 1994 by Jean Marie Chauvet and his team of speleologists. The paintings found in the cave represent images of animals: mountain goats, mammoths, horses, lions, bears, rhinoceroses, lions.
Rock art of Kakadu.
Located in the Northern Territory of Australia, National Park Kakadu contains one of the largest concentrations of Aboriginal art. The oldest works are believed to be 20,000 years old.
Drawing of a bison in the Altamira cave.
Discovered in the late 19th century, Altamira Cave is located in northern Spain. Surprisingly, the paintings found on the rocks were like this High Quality that scientists have long doubted their authenticity and even accused the discoverer, Marcelino Sanz de Sautuola, of forging the painting. Many people do not believe in the intellectual potential of primitive people. Unfortunately, the discoverer did not live to see 1902. This year the paintings were recognized as authentic. The images were made with charcoal and ocher.
Paintings by Lascaux.
The Lascaux Caves, located in southwest France, are decorated with impressive and famous cave paintings. Some of the images are 17,000 years old. Most of the rock paintings are depicted far from the entrance. The most famous images This cave contains images of bulls, horses and deer. The largest rock painting in the world is a bull in the Lascaux cave, which is 5.2 meters long.
primitive artAnyone endowed with a great gift - feel the beauty the surrounding world, feel harmony lines, admire the variety of shades of colors.
Painting- this is the artist’s perception of the world captured on canvas. If your perception of the world around you is reflected in the artist’s paintings, then you feel a kinship with the works of this master.
The paintings attract attention, fascinate, excite imagination and dreams, evoke memories of pleasant moments, favorite places and landscapes.
When did they appear first images created by man?
Appeal primitive people to a new type of activity for them - art - one of the greatest events in human history. Primitive art reflected man’s first ideas about the world around him, thanks to it knowledge and skills were preserved and passed on, and people communicated with each other. In spiritual culture primitive world art began to play the same universal role that a sharpened stone played in work.
What gave a person the idea to depict certain objects? Who knows whether body painting was the first step towards creating images, or whether a person guessed the familiar silhouette of an animal in a random outline of a stone and, by cutting it, gave it a greater resemblance? Or maybe the shadow of an animal or a person served as the basis for the drawing, and the imprint of a hand or a step precedes the sculpture? There is no definite answer to these questions. Ancient people could come up with the idea of depicting objects not in one, but in many ways.
For example, to the number the most ancient images on the walls of Paleolithic caves include human hand prints, and a random interweaving of wavy lines pressed into the damp clay by the fingers of the same hand.
Works of art from the Early Stone Age, or Paleolithic, are characterized by simplicity of shapes and colors. Rock paintings are usually the outlines of animal figures, made with bright paint - red or yellow, and occasionally - filled with round spots or completely painted over. Such ""paintings"" were clearly visible in the twilight of the caves, illuminated only by torches or the fire of a smoky fire.
In the initial stage of development primitive fine art didn't know laws of space and perspective, as well as composition, those. intentional distribution of individual figures on a plane, between which there is necessarily a semantic connection.
In living and expressive images stands before us history of the life of primitive man era of the Stone Age, told by himself in rock paintings.
Dance. Lleid painting. Spain. With a variety of movements and gestures, a person conveyed his impressions of the world around him, reflecting in them his own feelings, mood and state of mind. Crazy jumps, imitation of animal habits, stamping of feet, expressive hand gesturescreated the preconditions for the emergence of dance. There were also war dances associated with magical rituals, with faith in victory over the enemy.
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Composition in the Lascaux cave. France. On the walls of the caves you can see mammoths, wild horses, rhinoceroses, and bison. For primitive man, drawing was the same “witchcraft” as spells and ritual dances. By “conjuring” the spirit of a drawn animal by singing and dancing, and then “killing” it, a person seemed to master the power of the animal and “defeat” it before hunting.
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And these are petroglyphs. Hawaii
Murals on the Tassili-Ajer mountain plateau. Algeria.
Primitive people practiced sympathetic magic - in the form of dancing, singing or painting animals on the walls of caves - to attract herds of animals and ensure the continuation of the race and the safety of livestock. Hunters acted out scenes of a successful hunt to attract energy into real world. They turned to the Mistress of the Herds, and later to the Horned God, who was depicted with the antlers of goats or deer to emphasize his primacy over the herds. The bones of animals were supposed to be buried in the ground so that animals, like people, were reborn from the womb of Mother Earth.
This cave drawing in the Lascaux region of France from the Paleolithic era
Large animals were the preferred food. And Paleolithic people, skilled hunters, destroyed most of them. And not just large herbivores. During the Paleolithic, cave bears completely disappeared as a species.
There is another type of rock paintings, which has a mystical, mysterious character.
Rock paintings from Australia. Either people, or animals, or maybe both...
Drawings from West Arnhem, Australia.
Huge figures and small people next to them. And in the lower left corner there is generally something incomprehensible.
Here is a masterpiece from Lascaux, France.
North Africa, Sahara. Tassili. 6 thousand years BC Flying saucers and someone in a spacesuit. Or maybe it's not a spacesuit.
Rock art from Australia...
Val Camonica, Italy.
and the next photo is from Azerbaijan, Gobustan region
Gobustan is included in the UNESCO heritage list
Who were those “artists” who were able to convey the message of their time to distant eras? What prompted them to do this? What were the hidden springs and driving motives, which guided them?..Thousands of questions and very few answers...Many of our contemporaries love it when they are asked to look at history through a magnifying glass.
But is everything really so small in it?
After all, there were images of gods
In the north of Upper Egypt is ancient city temples of Abydos. Its origin dates back to prehistoric times. It is known that already in the era Old Kingdom(about 2500 BC) in Abydos, the universal deity Osiris was widely worshiped. Osiris was considered a divine teacher who gave the people of the Stone Age a variety of knowledge and crafts, and, quite possibly, knowledge about the secrets of heaven. By the way, it was in Abydos that it was found ancient calendar, dating back to the 4th millennium BC. e.
Ancient Greece And Ancient Rome also left a lot of rock evidence reminding us of their existence. They already had a developed written language - their drawings are much more interesting, from the point of view of studying everyday life, than ancient graffiti.
Why is humanity trying to find out what happened millions of years ago, what knowledge did ancient civilizations have? We look for the source because we think that by revealing it, we will find out why we exist. Humanity wants to find where that one is starting point the reference point from which it all began, because he thinks that, apparently, there is an answer, “what is all this for,” and what will happen in the end...
After all, the world is so vast, and the human brain is narrow and limited. The most complex crossword of history must be solved gradually, cell by cell...
Vintage cave paintings of primitive people were very amazing images, mostly they were all drawn on stone walls.
There is an opinion that the cave paintings of ancient people are various animals that were hunted at that time. Then these drawings were performed main role V magical rites, hunters wanted to attract real animals during their hunt.
Pictures and cave paintings of primitive people very often resemble a two-dimensional image. Rock art is very rich in drawings of bison, rhinoceroses, deer, and mammoths. Also in many pictures you can see hunting scenes or men with spears and arrows.
What did the first people draw?
Rock paintings of ancient people- this is one of their manifestations emotional state And imaginative thinking. Not everyone was able to create a vivid image of an animal or a hunt; only those people who could create such an image in their subconscious could do this.
There is also an assumption that ancient people transmitted their visions and life experience , that’s how they expressed themselves.
Where did primitive people draw?
Sections of caves that were hard to find - this is one of the best places for drawing. This explains the significance of rock paintings. Drawing was a certain ritual; artists worked in the light of stone lamps.
Rock paintings and engravings began tens of thousands of years before the birth of civilizations such as Greece and Mesopotamia. Although most of these works remain a mystery, they provide modern scholars with insight into daily life prehistoric people, understand their religious beliefs and culture. It is truly a miracle that these ancient drawings survived for such a long time in the face of natural erosion, wars and destructive human activities.
1. El Castillo
Spain
Some of the oldest known cave paintings in the world, depicting horses, bison and warriors, are located in the El Castillo cave, in Cantabria in northern Spain. There is a hole leading into the cave, so narrow that you have to crawl through it. In the cave itself you can find many drawings that are at least 40,800 years old.
They were made shortly after people began migrating from Africa to Europe, where they met Neanderthals. In fact, the age of the cave paintings suggests the possibility that they were made by Neanderthals who lived in the region at the time, although the evidence for this is not at all conclusive.
2.Sulawesi
Indonesia
For a long time, El Castillo Cave was believed to contain the oldest known cave paintings. But in 2014, archaeologists made a stunning discovery. In seven caves on the Indonesian island of Sulawesi, handprints and primitive drawings of local pigs were found on the walls.
These images were already known to local residents, but no one even knew how old they were. Scientists estimate the age of the rock paintings at 40,000 years. Such a discovery cast doubt on the long-held belief that human art first appeared in Europe.
3. Arnhem Land Plateau
Australia
Recent research has shown that some places in Australia may rival the world's oldest art in age. Rock art dating back 28,000 years was found at the Nawarla Gabarnmang rock shelter in the north of the country. However, scientists believe that some of the drawings may be much older, as one of them depicts a giant bird that went extinct about 40,000 years ago.
Therefore or rock art older than expected, or the bird lived longer than modern science suggests. In Nawarla Gabarnmang you can also find drawings of fish, crocodiles, wallabies, lizards, turtles and other animals made tens of thousands of years ago.
4. Apollo 11
Namibia
This cave has received so much unusual name, because it was discovered by a German archaeologist in 1969, when the first spaceship(Apollo 11) landed on the moon. Drawings were found on the stone slabs of a cave in southwestern Namibia. charcoal, ocher and white paint.
The images of creatures that resemble cats, zebras, ostriches and giraffes are between 26,000 and 28,000 years old and are the oldest fine arts, found in Africa.
5. Pech Merle Cave
France
Scientists believed that the 25,000-year-old paintings of two spotted horses on the walls of the Pech-Merle cave in south-central France were a figment of imagination. ancient artist. But recent DNA research has shown that similar spotted horses actually existed in the region at that time. Also in the cave you can find 5,000-year-old images of bison, mammoths, horses and other animals, painted with black manganese oxide and red ocher.
6. Tadrart-Akakus
Libya
Deep in the Sahara Desert in southwestern Libya, in the Tadrart-Akakus mountain range, thousands of paintings and rock carvings have been found that show that these arid lands once contained water and lush vegetation. Also on the territory of what is now the Sahara lived giraffes, rhinoceroses, and crocodiles. The oldest drawing here was made 12,000 years ago. But, after Tadrart-Akakus began to be swallowed up by the desert, people finally left this place around 100 AD.
7. Bhimbetka
India
There are about 600 caves and rock dwellings in Madhya Pradesh that contain rock paintings made between 1,000 and 12,000 years ago.
These prehistoric images are painted with red and white paint. In the paintings you can find scenes of hunting buffaloes, tigers, giraffes, moose, lions, leopards, elephants and rhinoceroses. Other drawings show the collection of fruits and honey and the domestication of animals. You can also find images of animals that have long been extinct in India.
8. Laas Gaal
Somalia
A complex of eight caves in Somaliland contains some of the oldest and best preserved rock paintings in Africa. They are estimated to be between 5,000 and 11,000 years old and are painted in red, orange and cream colors of cows, people, dogs and giraffes. Almost nothing is known about the people who lived here at that time, but many locals still consider the caves sacred.
9. Cueva de las Manos
Argentina
This unusual cave in Patagonia is overflowing with 9,000-year-old red and black handprints on the walls. Since there are mainly images of the left hands of teenage boys, scientists have suggested that drawing an image of one’s hand was part of the initiation rite for young men. In addition, scenes of hunting guanacos and flightless rhea birds can also be found in the cave.
10. Cave of Swimmers
Egypt
In 1933, a cave with Neolithic rock paintings was found in the Libyan Desert. The images of people swimming (from which the cave gets its name), as well as the handprints that adorn the walls, were made between 6,000 and 8,000 years ago.
