Art is a way of telling and showing people’s thoughts, observations, feelings without any limits. Art has existed since the beginning of humanity because art has existed with people’s desire to express themselves. Thanks to the embodiment of art, we can understand what humanity has felt and seen throughout history, especially owing to the cave art created by humanity centuries ago. To briefly define cave art, it is formed by carving, painting, and drawing cave walls. Considering that cave art dates back TO centuries, it’s hard not to be amazed. I think cave artists have very unique characteristics because these people, who had almost never seen any painting before, carved the cave walls and painted the walls with dyes obtained from certain plants, creating works of art that did not deteriorate for centuries. It is also wrong to say that the purpose of cave art is unclear, although cave art has no specific proven purpose. Research scientists have done many studies to solve this cave art mystery and have revealed some findings related to the purpose of cave art. According to some findings, people in ancient civilizations sometimes used cave art to convey what they saw, sometimes to express their imagination, and to reflect their religious rituals. 

The first purpose that comes to mind of cave art may be that people draw what they see around them on the walls. The article “ Palaeolithic cave-painters were ‘realists’ “, (Aletta Stevens, 2011), discusses that studies have been reported that ancient cave painters drawing spotted horses depicted what they saw in their environment. According to this article, the spotted horses depicted in some paleolithic cave paintings have caused much controversy among archaeologists. Some of the archaeologists have argued that these paintings do not reflect reality and are symbolic, while others argue that they are depictions of reality. The article claims that, according to a study by an international research team, people transferred what they saw to the cave walls. Accordingly, bones, and teeth of dozens of ancient horses dating back thousands of years in Siberia and Europe were analyzed, and some showed a type of leopard spot gene. As the article states, researchers conclude that all the horse colors seen in cave paintings were present in prehistoric horse populations. Dr. Melanie Pruvost, who heads the research team, says; “We are just starting to have the genetic tools to access the appearance of past animals and there are still a lot of question marks and phenotypes for which the genetic process has not yet been described,” and “However, we can already see that this kind of study will greatly improve our knowledge about the past.” Frankly, I think that the paintings on cave walls can be real, because people did not have any technology at that time, so it is much more likely that they could have painted exactly what they saw. 

Another of the purposes of cave art is to express people’s imagination. In addition, what makes cave art mysterious is that we don’t know exactly who did it. According to some research, we see that even teenagers perform cave art. As the article “Ancient Cave Art Full of Teenage Graffiti”, (Bjorn Carey, 2006) explains, many art historians and anthropologists believed that cave art was made by accomplished shaman artists, but sloppy paintings with graffiti-like sex and hunting scenes have also been discovered. According to Carey, an analysis of thousands of paintings from that time shows that the graffiti artists were the same as they are today, namely teenage males. Since cave art was made 40.000 years ago, artists often used their hands. Paleobiologist Dale Guthrie analyzed the sizes of the hands in European cave art and compared them with the hands of men and women of different ages, and concluded that these graffiti would belong to young men. According to Guthrie, teenage males at the time painted what was on their minds in graffiti because many of the wild animals in the caves in the pictures had spears inside and blood was coming out of their mouths. Guthrie likened this graffiti to today’s Ferrari races and football matches. Also, Guthrie says, “The people in the art are predominantly women, and not a single one has any clothes on.” I think that young men have had the same kind of imagination for centuries, and we can hypothesize that thanks to cave art. 

Prehistoric people used cave art to reflect what they saw during their spiritual rituals. In the YouTube video, “BBC Documentary – How Art Made the World 2 of 5 – The Day Pictures Were Born, (2015), ” claims that Archaeologist David Lewis-Williams believes that some ancient cave paintings were made by shamans who were able to connect with the spirit world through trance and ritual. He mentions that the murals, especially those made in deep and airless caves, are paintings of images seen during this trance. According to the video, shamans believe that their spirits left their bodies while they were alive and that they could travel to other realms. Williams believes that images of dreams that some shamans see during this trance are on cave walls. I can adopt his idea because shamans may have wanted to project on a wall what they saw while they were in a trance with their eyes closed.  

In conclusion, art is a form of communication in which people can express themselves freely. Since the earliest known human history, many branches of art have survived to the present day, such as cave art. In caves, people sometimes painted what they saw around them, sometimes their dreams, their rituals they believed in. There are still many things we do not know about these cave paintings, which are heirlooms from our ancestors, and as technological opportunities develop, new information will continue to emerge and will continue to enlighten us about ancient civilizations.