Prehistoric Art
Art made before writing, from engraved ochre and Ice Age caves to Neolithic pottery, carved pillars and megalithic monuments.
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Prehistoric art covers everything made before writing, a span reaching back tens of thousands of years. Among the oldest known deliberate designs are cross-hatched lines scratched on a piece of red ochre at Blombos Cave in South Africa, about 75,000 years ago. The last Ice Age produced cave painting across Europe and Asia, including the bison on the ceiling at Altamira in Spain.
As the ice retreated, art followed new ways of life. At Göbekli Tepe in Turkey, around 9500 BC, people raised T-shaped stone pillars carved with foxes, snakes and vultures, at the very beginnings of farming. Villagers at Çatalhöyük painted the walls of their houses, and Jōmon potters in Japan made some of the world's earliest ceramics. In Atlantic Europe, communities built megaliths: the passage tomb at Newgrange in Ireland, about 3200 BC, is aligned to the midwinter sunrise and carved with spirals, and Stonehenge was reworked over many centuries.
