"What is Paleolithic Art? travels from well-known Ice Age sites like Chauvet, Altamira, and Lascaux to visits with contemporary aboriginal artists, evoking a continuum between the cave paintings of our prehistoric past and the living rock art of today."--Page 4 of cover. "Was it a trick of the light that drew our Stone Age ancestors into caves to paint in charcoal and red hematite, to watch the heads of lions, likenesses of bison, horses, and aurochs...

Recounts the discovery of the caves in France that have artwork on the walls made by the Magdalenian people more than 17,000 years ago.

"One of the most significant works on our evolutionary ancestry since Richard Leakey's paradigm-shattering Origins, The First Signs is the first-ever exploration of the little-known geometric images that accompany most cave art around the world--the first indications of symbolic meaning, intelligence, and language. Imagine yourself as a caveman or woman. The place: Europe. The time: 25,000 years ago, the last Ice Age. In reality, you live in an open-air...

The Sentient Mammoth People' is a compelling description of the microlithic abstract art that was created by a civilized Caucasian culture who lived in east central Nebraska at the end of the Pleistocene epoch before the younger dryas event that caused the extinction of the large megafauna. The microlithic abstract art figurative language that's incorporated into the Mammoth People's heat-treated flint prismatic flake knives and their potsherds is...

Prehistoric imagery is enigmatic and has been largely overlooked by archaeologists; it is only in the last two decades that it has garnered serious academic attention. This volume addresses this lacuna and discusses visual expression across Neolithic Europe. The papers in this volume result from a meeting of the Neolithic Studies Group on the topic of 'Neolithic visual culture' at the British Museum in November 2010. The intention of the meeting was...

The rock art found in the World Heritage sites in the Alta area, Arctic Norway, comprise thousands of images including reindeer and elk as well as fish, birds, boats, humans and geometric patterns. They contain information about peoples who lived in this northern area from about 5000 BC up until the birth of Christ; such as possible social organizations, hunting and trapping, beliefs, rituals, stories, legends, myths, cultural changes and continuities....