Stone Age Artists Did Animation on Cave Walls, Study Asserts

We're familiar with the Stone Age, right? Fred Flintstone and all of that, not to mention the complete absence of industrial machinery.

Seriously, the Stone Age was a few generations of great progress, just not very fast on the evolutionary scale, as it were. But wait a bit, what about their art?

Not known for its art, the Stone Age is, yet a new study by an artist and an archaeologist concludes that the people who painted some of the images in France's famous Chauvet cave were, in fact, animators. 

How do you like that, Walt Disney? Mickey who?

Well, it's not that serious. Disney's hold on the popular animated imagination is probably secure. But what could be in dispute is the narrative that says that the first animations happened not all that long ago.

After careful study of the paintings on the wall of the Chauvet cave, the artist and archaeologist, Marc Azema and Florent Rivere, some of the art is meant to suggest multiple versions of the same scene — in other words, animation. 

The bison that looks like it has eight legs is merely one image of a bison superimposed on another image of the same bison, to suggest movement. View the image by the flicker of a torch's light, and you see what could very well be the simulation of that bison in motion.

Well, fancy that. Presumably, you could achieve the same effect by shaking your head vigorously from side to side. The predators in the image sure look like multiple versions of the same animal, shown at slightly different times in a slightly different space. So maybe there is something to this idea after all.

The key to remember here is that these images were painted on the wall of that cave 30,000 years ago. The other thing to note is that you can read more about it in the June issue of Antiquity.