The Prehistoric Paintings on the Walls of Caves Have Always Been Moving. But With the Right Kind of Light, Some Actually Seem to Move

As archaeologists study the work of ancient artists, they notice that the images aren’t simply static; some are painted into the contours of the rock and other are set in motion in torchlight

Ben Crair

September/October 2026

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Last year, I followed two archaeologists through a heavy metal gate into a cave called El Castillo, in northern Spain. Artists likely visited the cave many times between 13,000 and 41,000 years ago, with only torches and rudimentary lamps to help them avoid dangerous falls and cave bears with claws capable of lacerating stone. They entered the deepest, darkest chambers and made engravings and drawings of not only animals but also red disks, hand stencils and geometric patterns—nearly 3,000 of which remain legible today. “If the Paleolithic record were a book, then in El Castillo we have every chapter, more or less,” one of the archaeologists, Eduardo Palacio Pérez, told me. “We have practically all the themes in Paleolithic rock art in Europe.” 

Nowadays, the area that’s known as the dark zone, beyond the reach of natural light, isn’t so perilous. Cave bears went extinct more than 24,000 years ago, and El Castillo was outfitted with stairs and electric lighting for tourists in the 1950s. We passed through the first large chamber and turned down a passage-way normally off limits for visitors. We stopped to admire the so-called Polychrome Panel, or the Panel of Superimpositions, where many artists, over thousands of years, had crowded a wall with a mixture of hand stencils and outlines of animals in black charcoal and red, orange and brown ochres, faded to varying degrees. I would have liked to press my own palm against a stencil and shake hands across more than 30,000 years, but of course this was forbidden. “For scholars, the wall is sacred. You can’t touch anything,” said the other archaeologist, Diego Garate, a professor at Spain’s University of Cantabria, “but obviously, for Paleolithic people, it was the contrary. They were in a close relationship with the walls.” (So close, in fact, that researchers from the Max Planck Institute were recently able to recover ancient human DNA from some decorated cave walls.)

What motivated prehistoric people to create art in caves, often at great personal risk? The question has preoccupied and divided archaeologists ever since the discovery of the exquisite red-and-black bison on the ceiling of the Altamira cave, in northern Spain, in 1879. When Garate began his studies more than a century later, many scholars were still trying to crack the code. Different theories had slid into and out of fashion—that the animals were totems of different clans, representations of male and female fertility, or marks made by shamans in altered states of consciousness. Many scholars believe that the emergence of cave art was the moment when Homo sapiens became behaviorally modern, the product of a newly evolved capacity for symbolic and abstract thought.

As Garate visited more caves in Spain and France, helping discover around half a dozen decorated caverns in the Basque Country, he wondered less about the artists’ intentions and more about their experiences in the sites. Nowadays no one dares to light a smoky torch or touch the walls in the delicate environment of a cave like El Castillo, so Garate was happy, around a decade ago, to find a cave near a crowded Basque beach whose only artwork was some recent graffiti. “There was nothing of interest from an archaeological point of view,” he said. The first time Garate lit a torch inside that cave, the flame illuminated only a dozen feet or so, and its flickering red light moved constantly and danced with shadow. It was a completely different experience from exploring a cave with the white beam of a flashlight. “Cave art is not like a picture on the wall,” he said.

Other archaeologists, too, have turned their attention from drawings and etchings in isolation to other components of cave art, like lighting, placement, sound and touch. Their research is revealing cave art to be far more dynamic and immersive than most of us appreciate when we see it in photographs, or even a film like Werner Herzog’s Cave of Forgotten Dreams, a 2010 documentary about the Chauvet Cave in southern France. One pair of anthropologists called cave art a “pre-echo of cinema,” while another team compared it to “modern installation art,” which “integrated the artist/viewer and their physical environment in a two-way relationship that was constantly changing.” In their view, cognitive explanations for the origins of cave art have overlooked its sensual side.

I wanted to get a feel for this in El Castillo. The theory is that artists made hand stencils for thousands of years before they began depicting animals: One of the cave’s chambers was called the Ceiling of Hands. A decade ago, a British archaeologist named Paul Pettitt and several colleagues analyzed the placement of handprints along the walls. They found that the stencils hadn’t been slapped willy-nilly around the cave; the artists had carefully scrutinized the cave walls before making their marks. The majority of hand stencils were placed near a fissure or an undulation in the wall, often in a gripping position or in a concave curve. “The placement of the stencils suggests the use of hands to steady the explorer,” the team noted. Artists apparently maintained this close relationship with the walls of caves even as they started to depict animals around 35,000 years ago.

At the Polychrome Panel, Garate and Palacio Pérez used a laser pointer to help me discern the outlines of animals, faded over the millennia. They occurred at different sizes and orientations against the wall, like the shapes left by cookie cutters in dough, but their placement was not as random as it seemed. Like the hands, many animals were carefully placed to incorporate natural features of the cave. A large bison’s back seemed to bulge with muscle from a jut in the wall. “Some researchers say that this rock surface suggests the animal,” Palacio Pérez told me. In other caves, artists used cracks in the walls to complete the antlers of elk and ridges to suggest the dorsal lines of horses. Animals sometimes seemed to emerge from and recede into fissures—an effect that might have appeared almost animated in the moving shadows projected by a flickering torch.

Modern viewers have long admired the way in which cave artists used natural features, but until recently, not many have considered how these natural features might have inspired the art itself. Pettitt and the archaeologist Derek Hodgson have argued that the visual systems of Paleolithic hunters evolved to detect the outlines of large and partially obscured animals—and that this primed them to perceive animal-like shapes in the natural forms of dark and disorienting caves. Izzy Wisher, an archaeologist at Aarhus University, in Denmark, reached a similar conclusion. “One’s visual familiarity with certain stimuli (particular animals, faces or objects) may shape the visual system to perceive ambiguous or fragmented stimuli as being evocative of familiar forms,” she and colleagues wrote in 2023. 

Perhaps artists pressed into the darkest parts of caves to experience this confusion of the senses. They were not so much searching for blank canvases for their mental compositions as they were seeking to discover animal forms in dialogue with caves. The dark zone was not a lonely and lifeless place; it was filled with visions and encounters of which the art itself became a record. Pettitt and Hodgson have called the dark zone a “simulated hunting environment” that provoked the kinds of images the human visual system was inclined to perceive. 

We continued through a long tunnel with more hand stencils and arrived in a large chamber whose central stalagmite featured the “bison man,” a bison that seemed to be walking like a person, on his hind legs. Depictions of humans were rare in Paleolithic times, but some scholars have speculated that the figure could have represented a shaman wearing a hide.

The artist had chiseled away at the stone to create three-dimensional texture, giving extra definition to the figure’s knees and thighs—and some scholars believe he or she had also modified the top of the stalagmite to create a dramatic effect. Garate shone his flashlight on the stalagmite, and a shadow that looked like the silhouette of a bipedal bison appeared on the rear cave wall. Garate moved the flashlight, and the shadow figure seemed to walk. Pettitt wrote that there was “no clearer example of the interaction between cave topography, shadow and art in the Paleolithic use of deep caves.” 

But Garate wasn’t sure the effect was intentional. His flashlight made a far-reaching beam of light, but a ten-foot circle of flickering torchlight might not have been powerful enough to create the same projection. 

Torches aren’t allowed in El Castillo, to avoid blackening the walls, but Garate said debate might be settled another way: “We could light a torch in the computer and solve this problem with virtual reality.” Garate often uses digital reconstructions of caves to answer these kinds of questions, and Wisher published a paper in 2023 using virtual reality to simulate torchlight in another cave, called Las Monedas, on the same hill as El Castillo. 

I told Garate that the projected shadow seemed to me too bison-like to be accidental. “The cave suggests a lot of things,” he said with a shrug. We left the chamber and ducked again off the pathway into a tiny alcove that was so low we had to stoop. The archaeologists wanted to show me a work of art dubbed “The Mask of El Castillo.” The mask was on a curtain of rock that hung from the ceiling and was naturally sized and shaped like a bison’s head. The artist had painted only a black circle to suggest an eye and a black dash to suggest a nostril. “It’s like the head of a bison coming out of the wall,” Palacio Pérez pointed out. 

Of all the figurative art I’d seen, it was the simplest—just two black markings—yet the most evocative. It felt as though the bison itself were waiting for visitors, so he could give advice or take confession. The work summoned a presence. It required no mind-altering substances, only the natural gropings of the human senses, an intimate encounter with space and stone. The artwork may have been private, but the artist was not alone. 

From Bison to Byron

Evidence from paleolithic art shows how humanity evolved to make a great cognitive leap

By Angela Serratore

When our prehistoric counterparts crawled deep into caves to create art on the walls, many researchers agree, those early humans were also leaving evidence of a profound moment in the human mind’s evolution: the emergence of abstract thought.

A painted bison, however rudimentary, is a symbol—a representation of something not physically present. Creating and understanding symbols requires the ability to think beyond the here and now, connecting lines on a wall to the shape of a living, breathing creature outside the cave. 

“Today, much of my mind is contained within my mobile phone, the modern equivalent to a painted animal or carved figurine for an Ice Age hunter-­gatherer,” says Steven Mithen, an archaeologist at the University of Reading in England and the author of The Prehistory of the Mind, The Singing Neanderthals and The Language Puzzle, among other titles. 

As Mithen and many others see it, when humans developed the capacity to depict images of their world, they were also strengthening their ability to think in categories—what we’d now call abstract thought. Ice Age people, he says, used paintings and carvings as “cognitive anchors” for ideas that were otherwise difficult to remember, share or process. Mithen explains: “Earlier humans, whether of Homo sapiens or other species, such as the Neanderthals, never mastered this trick of extending their powers of thought by using material objects, constraining them to live in a world without abstract ideas.”

With cognitive and cultural evolution, shared knowledge became easier to sustain and pass down to future generations. 

“The figurative art of cave painting took the externalization of ideas and information to an unprecedented level,” Mithen says, “one not exceeded until the invention of writing many thousands of years later.” 

Ben Crair writes frequently for the New Yorker, New York magazine and Bloomberg Businessweek.