Cave art has been discovered on every inhabited continent, with major concentrations in Europe, Southeast Asia, Australia, Africa, and the Americas. The oldest known examples date back more than 45,000 years, and new discoveries regularly push that timeline further. While certain sites like Lascaux in France have become household names, thousands of caves and rock shelters worldwide contain paintings, engravings, and hand stencils left by ancient peoples.
Western Europe
France and Spain hold the densest concentration of known cave art in the world, with hundreds of decorated caves scattered across the regions. The Franco-Cantabrian area, stretching from southern France into northern Spain, became the first major hub of cave art research after the discovery of Altamira in Spain in 1879 and has remained central to the field ever since.
In France, the most celebrated sites include Lascaux in the Dordogne region, famous for its vivid depictions of horses, bulls, and deer painted roughly 17,000 years ago. Chauvet Cave in the Ardèche gorge contains some of Europe’s oldest art, dating to around 36,000 years ago, with detailed renderings of lions, rhinoceroses, and bears. The Cosquer Cave near Marseille is notable partly because its entrance is now submerged underwater due to rising sea levels since the last Ice Age. Font-de-Gaume and Les Combarelles, also in the Dordogne, feature polychrome bison and engravings of mammoths.
Spain’s contributions are equally significant. The Cave of Altamira in Cantabria displays stunning polychrome bison on its ceiling, painted around 14,000 years ago. More recently, research in three Spanish caves (La Pasiega, Maltravieso, and Ardales) dated red hand stencils and geometric marks to over 65,000 years ago, which would make them the work of Neanderthals rather than modern humans. This finding remains debated but has reshaped conversations about who created Europe’s earliest art.
Beyond France and Spain, cave art also appears in Italy, Portugal, the United Kingdom, Germany, and Romania. Creswell Crags in England contains engravings of birds and ibex dating to around 13,000 years ago.
Southeast Asia and Indonesia
Some of the oldest cave art in the world is found not in Europe but in the limestone caves of Sulawesi, Indonesia. A painting of a warty pig in the Leang Tedongnge cave has been dated to at least 45,500 years ago, making it one of the earliest known figurative artworks anywhere. Nearby, the Leang Bulu’ Sipong 4 cave contains a hunting scene depicting part-human, part-animal figures pursuing wild pigs and dwarf buffalo, dated to at least 43,900 years ago.
The Indonesian island of Borneo (Kalimantan) also holds significant cave art. Paintings of wild cattle in the Lubang Jeriji Saléh cave have been dated to roughly 40,000 years ago. Hand stencils, which are made by blowing pigment over a hand pressed against the rock, are abundant across both Sulawesi and Borneo caves. These Southeast Asian discoveries have challenged the long-held assumption that sophisticated cave art originated in Europe, suggesting that artistic expression may have emerged independently in multiple regions or traveled with early humans as they migrated.
Australia
Australia contains one of the longest continuous traditions of rock art on Earth, created by Aboriginal peoples over tens of thousands of years. The Kimberley region of Western Australia is home to Gwion Gwion (formerly called Bradshaw) figures, elegant depictions of human forms in elaborate headdresses and clothing. Kakadu National Park in the Northern Territory features rock shelters with layered art spanning thousands of years, including depictions of animals, spiritual beings, and even European ships from the colonial era.
Arnhem Land contains some of the richest rock art galleries in the country. A painting of a kangaroo in this region was dated using the remains of ancient wasp nests to around 17,300 years ago, making it one of the oldest dated paintings in Australia. Aboriginal rock art is distinctive because it was not a one-time event. Many sites were painted over repeatedly across millennia, creating palimpsests where newer images overlay older ones.
Africa
Africa holds some of the earliest evidence of symbolic behavior in humans, and its rock art traditions are vast. The Drakensberg Mountains in South Africa contain thousands of rock shelters decorated by the San people over the last several thousand years. These paintings are unusually detailed, depicting hunting scenes, dances, and figures in states of spiritual trance that offer insight into San belief systems.
In the Sahara, the Tassili n’Ajjer plateau in Algeria preserves over 15,000 drawings and engravings that document a time when the region was green and fertile. The art spans roughly 6,000 to 2,000 years ago and shows cattle herding, swimming, and wildlife that no longer exists in the area. The Brandberg Mountain in Namibia, the Tsodilo Hills in Botswana, and the Apollo 11 Cave in Namibia (where stone slabs with animal figures have been dated to around 25,000 to 27,000 years ago) are other key sites. The Apollo 11 stones represent some of the oldest known art from the African continent.
The Americas
Cave and rock art spans both North and South America, though it generally dates to more recent periods than the oldest European or Asian examples. In Brazil, the Serra da Capivara National Park in Piauí state contains rock shelters with thousands of paintings depicting hunting, dancing, and geometric patterns. Some researchers have proposed dates exceeding 20,000 years for certain marks at the site, though this remains contested.
The Cueva de las Manos (Cave of the Hands) in Patagonia, Argentina, is one of South America’s most iconic sites. Its walls are covered with hand stencils in red, black, yellow, and white, the oldest of which date to around 9,300 years ago. Hunting scenes showing guanacos (a relative of the llama) surround the hand prints.
In North America, pictographs and petroglyphs appear across the continent. The Barrier Canyon style figures in Utah’s Canyonlands region are tall, haunting humanoid shapes that may be several thousand years old. Baja California in Mexico contains the Great Murals, large-scale paintings of humans and animals in rock shelters that can stretch over 150 meters long. The Dunbar Cave in Tennessee and various caves in the Ozarks and Appalachian regions contain Indigenous art that has only recently begun to receive detailed study.
Other Notable Regions
India’s Bhimbetka rock shelters in Madhya Pradesh are a UNESCO World Heritage site with paintings spanning from the Paleolithic era to the medieval period. The earliest layers show large animals like bison and tigers, while later layers depict communal dances and horseback riders. Over 500 shelters in the area contain some form of art.
In the Middle East, petroglyphs have been found across the Arabian Peninsula, particularly in the Hail region of Saudi Arabia, where rock art depicting camels, ibex, and human figures was recently added to the UNESCO World Heritage list. Turkey’s Latmos region near the Aegean coast contains rock paintings of human figures dating to roughly 5,000 to 8,000 years ago.
The sheer geographic spread of cave and rock art tells us something important: the impulse to make images on stone walls was not a quirk of one culture or one migration route. It appeared wherever humans settled, from tropical islands to frozen landscapes, using whatever pigments the local environment provided. Many sites remain difficult to access, and new discoveries continue as researchers apply modern dating techniques and survey previously unexplored caves in remote regions.