page_title: Art of the Upper Paleolithic
hierarchical_section_title: Art of the Upper Paleolithic
caption_attribution_description: English: Lions painted in the Chauvet Cave (Ardèche, France). This is a replica of the painting from the Brno museum Anthropos (Czech Republic). The absence of the name sometimes leads to these paintings being described as portraits of lionesses.
context_page_description: The art of the Upper Paleolithic represents the oldest form of prehistoric art. Figurative art is present in Europe and Southeast Asia, beginning between about 40,000 to 35,000 years ago.
  Non-figurative cave paintings, consisting of hand stencils and simple geometric shapes, are somewhat older, at least 40,000 years old, and possibly as old as 64,000 years.
  This latter estimate is due to a controversial 2018 study based on uranium-thorium dating, which would imply Neanderthal authorship and qualify as art of the Middle Paleolithic.
  The emergence of figurative art has been interpreted as reflecting the emergence of full behavioral modernity, and is part of the defining characteristics separating the Upper Paleolithic from the Middle Paleolithic.
  The discovery of cave art of comparable age to the oldest European samples in Indonesia has established that similar artistic traditions existed both in eastern and in western Eurasia at 40,000 years ago. This has been taken to suggest that such an artistic tradition must in fact date to more than 50,000 years ago, and would have been spread along the southern coast of Eurasia in the original coastal migration movement.
context_section_description: The art of the Upper Paleolithic represents the oldest form of prehistoric art.  Figurative art  is present in  Europe and  Southeast Asia, beginning between about 40,000 to 35,000 years ago.
  Non-figurative cave paintings, consisting of hand stencils and simple geometric shapes, are somewhat older, at least 40,000 years old, and possibly as old as 64,000 years.
  This latter estimate is due to a controversial 2018 study based on uranium-thorium dating, which would imply Neanderthal authorship and qualify as art of the Middle Paleolithic.
  The emergence of figurative art has been interpreted as reflecting the emergence of full  behavioral modernity, and is part of the defining characteristics separating the Upper Paleolithic from the Middle Paleolithic. 
  The discovery of cave art of comparable age to the oldest European samples in Indonesia has established that similar artistic traditions existed both in eastern and in western Eurasia at 40,000 years ago. This has been taken to suggest that such an artistic tradition must in fact date to more than 50,000 years ago, and would have been spread along the southern coast of Eurasia in the original coastal migration movement. The discovery of a figurative painting dated to over 40,000 (perhaps as old as 52,000) years old, of an unknown animal, has been announced in 2018, discovered in a cave on the Indonesian island of Borneo.
  It is important to note that most of the art of this period is expected to have been lost, as it was submerged in the early Holocene sea level rise.
  Cave art in Europe continued to the Mesolithic (at the beginnings of the Holocene) about 12,000 years ago. 
  European Upper Paleolithic art is also known informally as "Ice Age art", in reference to the last glacial period.
caption: (Replica of) cave lion drawings from Chauvet Cave in Southern France from the Aurignacian period (c. 35,000 to 30,000 years old)
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