This Bradshaw rock painting from Australia shows tasseled costumed figures in various poses or actions.
This list presents a small selection of the work of artists who lived during the time that writing hadn't as yet been invented and popularized in human societies. This page contains, by sheer volume of the artwork discovered, a very incomplete list of the paintings, drawings, sculptures, engravings, and other works by the artists who created what we now call Stone Age art. For fuller lists see Art of the Upper Paleolithic, Art of the Middle Paleolithic, and Category:Prehistoric art and its many sub-categories
Elaborately decorated stone ball, 3200–2500 BC, National Museums of Scotland [1]
Adam of Govrlevo, or "Adam of Macedonia". At more than 7,000 years old, the sculpture is the oldest artifact found in the Republic of Macedonia. The artist depicts a sitting male body, and shows details of his spine, ribs, navel, and phallus. The piece is now exhibited in the Skopje City Museum.
Bird stones. People have found thousands of these portable bird-shaped stone sculptures created by generations of North American sculptors.
Bison Licking Insect Bite, an app. 15,000-year-old carved and engraved fragment of a spear-thrower made of reindeer antler, the piece depicts a member of the now extinct Bison species steppe wisent. The artist carved the bison's head turned to its right and licking itself as if bitten by an insect.[2] It's exhibited in the National Museum of Prehistory in Les Eyzies-de-Tayac-Sireuil, not far from where it was found.
Löwenmensch, or Lion Man, is an ivorysculpture that is both the oldest known animal-shaped sculpture in the world and, at 40,000 years,[3] the oldest known uncontested example of figurative art. The sculpture is now housed in the Ulm Museum in Ulm, Germany.
Montastruc decorated stone. The artist has scratched or engraved a human figure - which appears to be female - as he or she decorated a fragment of a piece of limestone used as a lamp. From Courbet Cave, France, it now resides in the British Museum.
Robin Hood Cave Horse (previously known as the Ochre Horse). This fragment of rib that the artist engraved with a horse's head was discovered in the Robin Hood Cave in Creswell Crags, Derbyshire, England. It is the only animal-related Upper Paleolithicportable artwork ever found in Britain.[4][5]Robin Hood Cave Horse is now housed in the British Museum.
The Shigir Idol, a 11,000 years old wooden sculpture, resides in the "Historic Exhibition" Museum in Yekaterinburg, Russia.
Swimming Reindeer is a 13,000-year-old (Magdalenian) sculpture of two swimming reindeer ornately carved from the tusk of a mammoth. The sculpture is now in the British Museum.
Altamira cave (Spain) - in 1879 the first prehistoric paintings and drawings were discovered in this cave, which soon became famous for their depth of color and depictions of animals, hands, and abstract shapes.
Bhimbetka rock shelters (India) - the shelters, decorated with art from 30,000 years ago, contain the oldest evidence of artists exhibiting their work on the Indian sub-continent.
Bradshaw rock paintings (Australia) - Aboriginal artists painted well over a million paintings in this site in the Kimberley, many of human figures ornamented with accessories such as bags, tassels and headdresses.[6] These artworks are well over 20,000 years old.
Chauvet Cave (France) - some of the earliest cave paintings known, and considered among the most important prehistoric art sites.
Chufin cave (Spain) - small cave with engravings, stick figures, and artwork schematically portraying red deer, goats and cattle.
Coliboaia cave (Romania) contains the oldest known cave paintings of Central Europe, radiocarbon dated to 32,000 and 35,000 BP, corresponding to the Aurignacian and Gravettian cultures of the Paleolithic period.
Cuciulat cave (Romania) features several red paintings of animals, including horses and felines, which are about 12,000 years old. These were the first manifestations of this kind known in Central Europe.
Cueva de las Manos (Cave of Hands) (Argentina) - a series of caves exhibiting hundreds of outlines of human hands, hunting scenes, and animals painted 13,000 to 9,000 years ago.
Côa Valley (Portugal) - artists engraved thousands of drawings of horses and other animal, human and abstract figures in open-air artwork completed 22,000 to 10,000 years ago.
Cosquer Cave (France) - hand stencils from 27,000 years ago, and 19,000-year-old animal drawings that portray bison, ibex, horses, seals and what may be auks and jellyfish, showcase this gallery.
A 16,000-year-old masterwork from the Lascaux cave in France
El Castillo cave, one of the Monte Castillo caves (Spain) - contains decorations in red ochre paint which has been blown onto the walls in the forms of hand stencils as long as 37,000 years ago, and painted dots. One faint red dot has been dated to 40,800 years ago, making it the oldest dated cave decoration in the world.[7][8] It is 5,000-10,000 years older than caves so-far found in France.[9][10]
Font-de-Gaume in south-west France contains over 200 polychrome paintings and engravings from artists who worked over 17,000 years ago. The cave's most famous painting is a frieze of five bison, although renditions of many other animals, including wolves, are featured.
Gabarnmung (Australia) - this rock-art site in the Northern Territory features the oldest artwork in Australia at over 28,000 years. Aboriginal artists painted fish, crocodiles, people, and spiritual figures, mostly on the site's ceilings.[11][12]
Caves of Gargas, France, features numerous negative hand stencils, some with one or more fingers absent.
Kapova cave in southern Ural Mountains (Russia) - presently 173 monochromatic ochre rock paintings and charcoal drawings or their traces are documented, presenting Pleistocene animals and abstract geometric motives. They are about 18,000 - 16,000 years old, from Late Solutrean to Middle Magdalenian.
Lascaux caves (France) - contains some of the best known artworks of early painters, many of those portraying large animals.
La Marche (France) - due to the style the legitimacy of the cave paintings here are in dispute.
La Pasiega cave (Spain) - an art gallery created in prehistoric times, the exhibition of artwork here runs for at least 120 meters.
Les Combarelles (France) - two galleries showcase more than 600 engravings. The more-than-11,000-year-old artwork portrays such subjects as reindeer drinking water from the river that flows through the cave, cave bears, cave lions, mammoths, and various symbols.[13]
Toquepala Caves (Peru) - "Abrigo del Diablo" and the other caves contain at least 50 noted pieces. The artists used paint made from hematite, and painted in seven colors with red being dominant. [14][15][16]
Seated Woman of Çatalhöyük is a baked-clay nude female form seated between feline-headed arm-rests which is missing its original head and right side hand rest (although reconstructions of the artist's possible intent have been added). Resides at the Museum of Anatolian Civilizations in Ankara, Turkey.
^Clottes, Jean (2003). Chauvet Cave: The Art of Earliest Times. Paul G. Bahn (translator). University of Utah Press. ISBN0-87480-758-1. Translation of La Grotte Chauvet, l'art des origins, Éditions du Seuil, 2001, p. 214.
^Amos, Jonathan (June 14, 2012). "Red dot becomes 'oldest cave art'". BBC News. Archived from the original on 2012-06-15. Retrieved 15 June 2012. One motif – a faint red dot – is said to be more than 40,000 years old.
^Michel Geneste, Jean (2010). "Earliest Evidence for Ground-Edge Axes: 35,400±410 cal BP from Jawoyn Country, Arnhem Land". Australian Archaeology71 (December): 66–69.|access-date= requires |url= (help)
Swimming Reindeer, a 13,000-year-old mammoth-tusk sculpture now residing in the British Museum, depicts a female on the right and a male on the left (move scanning bar to the right).