Among the animals we have lost are the mammoth, the mastodon, the giant sloth, and the saber-toothed cat. Man has attempted to depict what these animals looked like in life since prehistoric times. The image below is a painting by a modern artist, Michael Amesbury. It's a 1995 AD painting of 17,000 BC paintings in a cave in Lascaux, France. This centerpiece painting is doubly appropriate since we are going to explore depictions of ancient life through the eyes of modern artists and their Pleistocene counterparts.
Modern artists reconstruct ancient environments using whatever sources they have available.
This may include the skeletons and skins of ancient animals, fossilized remains of plants, study of glacial evidence to find out what the climate was like, and also whatever examples of prehistoric art are available. Ancient man did not have much time available to decorate their dwellings with landscape paintings, but they did leave a record in cave paintings and small sculptures of the animals they hunted or may have used as totemic symbols. Pleistocene Art Pleistocene man used charcoal and ochre as paints for their images or used sharpened tools to scrape outlines of their images directly into the cave walls. Sometimes they would painstakingly grind and carve animal or human shapes out of rock, bone, horn or antlers to make small sculptures. These artworks have survived to the present day in caves whose entrances were blocked millenia ago and were recently found.