Why Ancient Animal Art Looks Similar

Julia

Welcome back to "Where Does Art Come From?" I’m Julia, and today we’re gonna try to untangle a question that sort of blows my mind every time I think about it. Why are the animal drawings from caves in Europe and Southeast Asia so, well, similar? And I mean, not just vaguely similar—you can look at a bison in France and a babirusa over in Sulawesi, Indonesia, and if you squint, the style, the use of profile, those bold outlines—yet they almost look like they belong to the same tradition. But we know they’re separated by thousands and thousands of miles and years. It’s incredible.

Julia

So, here’s what set all this off. In 2014, researchers used Uranium-Thorium dating on these cave paintings in Maros, Sulawesi, and found that some of the animal art is at least 40,000 years old—older than the famous caves of France and Spain. Suddenly, Europe wasn’t the only cradle of animal art. But that raised this huge question: did humans, wherever they were, just happen to invent the same style of animal drawing all on their own? Or is this a sign of some deep, shared artistic or cognitive thread that started even earlier, maybe back in Africa before people split up and wandered all over the globe?

Julia

Now, some scholars, like Aubert and his team, argue for this “Out of Africa” pathway—basically, that our ancestors were already primed for symbolic, representational art as they left Africa, and they just carried it with them. Others, like Conard, suggest a more mosaic or polycentric story, where different groups came up with similar ideas independently, maybe because their lives and environments nudged them in similar directions.

Julia

Either way, when you compare places like the Maros caves in Indonesia, Apollo 11 Cave in Namibia, and the Franco-Cantabrian caves in Europe, a pattern pops out. It’s always the side profile. Always the accentuated outline—sometimes with the most basic internal details, sometimes not even that. And the subject animals themselves, those depend on what animals were around, but it’s the manner they’re depicted that’s so, well, persistent. I remember the first time I stood in a cave in southwest France, staring at the profile of a horse—there was this jolt of recognition. I mean, you just know it’s a horse, even though it’s mostly just a line, a bit of paint for the mane and eye, and that’s it. What is it about that way of showing animals that’s so universal, so instantly recognizable?

Julia

And, you know, this isn’t just about Europe and Indonesia. Same profile strategies show up in Yunnan, China, and even in rock art from northern Australia. So what’s going on? Why does the human brain keep coming back to this formula? That’s where things start getting really interesting—and a little bit neuroscience-y, actually. So let’s wind our way from caves to cortex…

Julia

In our last episode, we poked at the idea that maybe art—especially ancient art—was kind of a byproduct of other cognitive stuff, not some adaptation selected for on its own. But if you ask Derek Hodgson and a circle of visual neuroscientists, there’s a far bigger reason for this sameness in cave animal drawings—and it has everything to do with how our brains are wired to see.

Julia

Think about this: the visual system, especially the part for recognising animals, it doesn’t mess about with fine details first. but goes straight for the basics: shapes, those iconic outlines. When an Ice Age hunter saw a flicker in the bushes, all they really needed was a silhouette—a back, a head, maybe antlers or a horn—to decide “Is that a reindeer or a rock?” Miss that, and, well, dinner’s off… or you’re dinner, depending on the day.

Julia

What Hodgson argues is that this chunk of the visual brain acts as a filter, a sort of template that’s been burned in by evolutionary pressures. And when people started making art—anywhere in the world—they tapped into these same neural “sign stimuli.” That’s why, whether it’s a Sulawesi babirusa or a French bison, they’re almost always shown in side view, with bold outlines and only the most important features. It’s basically art that gets its job done with minimal fuss.

Julia

Here’s something that sticks with me: you give someone who can draw a crayon and tell them to draw a dog, and what do they do? Side profile, basic ears and a tail, legs stuck out, sometimes with that weird lollipop body shape. It’s a little embarrassing how close that is to the basics you see on a cave wall—thousands of years and continents apart. Hodgson would say that’s proof of just how deeply these neural circuits run. We’re sort of built to see “animals” this way, and when we make marks, those mental patterns just bubble up, regardless of the environment or even the specific animal.

Julia

But it’s not all biology. Cultural tweaks matter too—some societies focus on certain animals, others might exaggerate particular horns or patterns. The outlines and profiles, though, persist because they’re the quickest, most reliable way to trigger recognition, both in ancient hunters and, apparently, modern art lovers. It’s this strange dance between biology—what our brains need—and culture—what our societies value.

Julia

And, you know, these visual conventions are so rooted that even when new styles show up—like when cave artists in Europe began adding more details—they’re still building on that basic “signature.” It’s as if the brain sets the base, and culture adds the toppings. That’s why ancient animal art, wherever you look, feels sort of… familiar.

Julia

Okay, but here’s a twist—before people even started drawing animals, they were making a totally different kind of mark. And really, it might be even more fundamental to understanding why humans started making art at all. Let’s get into that.

Julia

So before we ever got to animals, our ancestors were—quite literally—leaving their own mark. Hand prints and stencils, the sort of thing you see in Leang Timpuseng in Sulawesi, at El Castillo in Spain, and out in Arnhem Land, Australia. They’re just everywhere, and usually, they turn up earlier and in bigger numbers than those animal drawings. Why? Well, the simplest answer seems to be: hand prints are easy.

Julia

You get ochre on your hand—maybe from preparing pigment, maybe from butchering an animal, who knows—you press your hand on the wall, and there it is. Sometimes, you blow around your hand to make a stencil. No complicated planning, no fancy technique needed. Hodgson and others think those hand marks might even come before the more “intentional” stencils, just as a byproduct of messy, practical life.

Julia

But there’s a twist: the brain, it seems, is genuinely obsessed with hands. There are special circuits—mirror neurons, for example—that get a kick out of perceiving hands and gestures, both ours and other people’s. That makes every hand mark instantly, emotionally relevant, not just to the person making it but to anyone who comes along afterward. Patricia Dobrez suggests this could explain why the urge to make a hand mark spreads so easily—you see it, you want to do it too. There’s immediacy, connection, almost like a handshake through time.

Julia

Now, there’s this interesting debate: are hand marks just simple indices, the earliest “I was here,” or are they a sort of proto-icon, a step on the road to representing not just ourselves but the world around us? Some researchers—Malotki, for instance—call them “proto-iconic forerunners.” I remember, as a student, kneeling in a cave with this ochre-stained stone in my hand and feeling this strange sense that, okay, making a mark isn’t just about leaving evidence of yourself, it’s part of a chain of gestures reaching back who knows how far. I might be romanticizing, but it’s a powerful sensation.

Julia

And those geometric motifs? Squiggles, dots, grid patterns—recent research suggests some of those may go back even further than hand marks. At El Castillo, the oldest art isn’t even a hand—it’s a red disk, with similar dates. And in Africa, there are engraved shell patterns stretching back half a million years!

Julia

It’s truly humbling. The journey from smudged palms to the breathtaking animal figures of Lascaux or Sulawesi isn’t a straight shot. It zigzags through neurological quirks, environmental accidents, and bursts of cultural creativity. From basic hand prints all the way to those wild hybrid creatures—therianthropes—they’re all links in a much longer chain than anyone guessed a century ago.

Julia

Thanks for listening, and as always, if you’ve got thoughts, questions, or wild cave dreams, send them in. Until then!