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Henri Breuil was a French priest, but he was also the foremost expert on cave art for much of the 20th century. He believed, perhaps not surprisingly, that the paintings were about hunting. Prehistoric artists had painted animals because they believed it would increase the chances of a successful hunt. The theory made sense. It certainly explained why only some animals had been painted. Breuil seemed to have settled the question.
But more recently, when archeologists began to examine the bones of animals that had been hunted and then eaten around the caves, they discovered something puzzling. If people had created these images to improve the chances of a successful hunt, you'd expect them to paint pictures of their quarry, but they didn't. At Altamira, for instance, prehistoric artists had painted oxen.
"But the bones that'd been left were those of deer. At other French sites, they were painting woolly mannas that they were eating, a wild version of this animal --the goat. All in all there is very little correlation between the animals depicted in prehistoric art and the animals that feature in a prehistoric diet."
So Breuil's hunting theory had also failed to solve the mystery of why people first started painting. And there was a bigger problem with these theories: the pictures would need to be painted in places where people could see them. Yet something had compelled many prehistoric artists to paint in the narrowest and deepest parts of the caves ,like here in Pech Merel in France.
"Sometimes images are found on parts of a cave that are almost inaccessible. It's hard to imagine how the artists got in to paint them, let alone imagine how anyone else got in to admire them. I mean who would have got into a tight spot like this to decorate the ceiling. "
This painting isn't just difficult to reach. When you finally get here, it's even harder to understand what these artists were painting . Because like many other cave images, it doesn't seem to represent anything at all.
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