Why there are no prehistoric cave paintings in the Levant

A team of archaeologists from Tel Aviv University have now come up with an original explanation. Their work was published in the Journal of the Israel Prehistoric Society 2024 in an editorial article titled ‘Why is Cave Art Absent from the Upper Paleolithic Southern Levant?’.

An ‘intriguing’ enigma

The article describes the absence of depictions on Levantine cave walls as “one of the most intriguing enigmas in Levantine prehistoric research”. But why is this an enigma?

The researchers explain that “physical as well as cultural contacts were in practice between the Aurignacian groups of western Europe and the Levant”. The Aurignacian is a Eurasian archaeological culture from 43,000– 28,000 years ago. “These groups are believed to be descendants of a shared common ancestry population that migrated from Africa (some even 50,000-70,000 years ago),” the researchers wrote.

Unlike the Levant, Europe boasts a plethora of Aurignacian art, from miniature figurines carved out of stone and ivory, to cave paintings most notably at the Chauvet Cave in southeastern France. The cave boasts the earliest figurative cave painting in Europe, dating to 30,000-32,000 years ago. Discovered in 1994, it features stunning portraits of several animals such as mammoths, bears, cave lions, rhinos, bison, and most famously, horses.

Explaining the enigma

The researchers began with the premise that prehistoric cave art “served as [a] mediator between early humans and the world they lived in, a window into their fears and desires… [and] played a role in human relationships with the cosmos rather than being decorative or tokens of personal identity”.

They further argued that visual expressions by Aurignacian groups in Europe may have “stemmed from a sense of anxiety or even dread accompanying the decline and eventual extinction of megaherbivores in the region.” They speculated that these were part of rituals intended to appeal to entities beyond the cave walls where they were painted, asking for solutions for the extinction of large animals on which people depended for survival.

If this premise were true, the “absence of imagery during the Aurignacian in the Levant could be attributed to the much earlier disappearance of megaherbivores in that area prior to the onset of the Aurignacian”, the researchers argued. They wrote: “In the Levant… large prey such as elephants had already declined significantly [by the time of the Aurignacian] or completely disappeared by the end of the Lower Paleolithic…”

A speculative theory

This theory definitely offers a logical explanation for a quandary that has long puzzled experts.

“This is a century-old mystery in Israeli archaeological research,” Professor Ron Barkai, the lead author of the article, told reporters. “The people in both regions belonged to the same culture… Their tools were similar, and their artistic objects, beads, and pendants for example, were also similar. There is no doubt that humans here had the cognitive ability to paint and were no less capable than their European contemporaries.”

However, this is still a fairly speculative theory, which relies on a certain perspective on why prehistoric humans made art — one that is definitely not shared by all scholars. There are those, for instance, who believe that prehistoric humans made art for art’s sake, and there was not necessarily any functional purpose behind creating art. Others believe that the very process of making art had benefits, such as improving social cohesion.

At the end of the day, just like there is no singular reason why we make art today, there is likely no one explanation for why prehistoric people produced art.