Illuminating cave art

Deep in our past, in the dark depths of caves, our ancestors did something strange and beautiful. Working by firelight, some doodled little designs. Others made hand stencils. Some saw a bulge of rock, or a crack in the wall, and thought to turn it into a horse or a bison. Why did they did they make this art? What did it mean to them? Who were these artists? These questions are old—very old—but thanks to new methods and new interpretive frameworks, archaeologists are beginning to see them in a new light.  My guest today is Dr. Izzy Wisher. Izzy is an archaeologist at Aarhus University in Denmark, specializing in Paleolithic art.  Here, Izzy and talk about why we in the present are so drawn to cave art. We lay out the basic timeline, geography, and categories of Paleolithic art. We consider the difference between figurative and non-figurative art, and why it might be that non-figurative art came first. We discuss hand stencils. We talk about an ongoing shift in archaeology as the sensory turn. We dig into some of Izzy's work on the role of pareidolia, palimpsests, and children in cave art. And we touch on an ongoing project she is involved in trying to understand the earliest symbolic marks that our species made—and what they could have been used for. Along the way we touch on the site known as El Castillo, Werner Herzog, hunting magic, why hand stencils are so often missing fingers, graffiti, tectiforms and flutings, why depictions of humans are actually quite rare in cave art, stages in children's art production, the use of virtual reality as a research method, and the idea of archaeology as world-building.  I think you'll enjoy this one friends. Who among us—after all—doesn't feel drawn to these caves, to these most enigmatic of human creations? Without further ado, here's my conversation with Dr. Izzy Wisher.   Notes 3:00 – For more on El Castillo cave, see here and here. 9:00 – Werner Herzog's film—Cave of Forgotten Dreams—is being briefly re-released in April 2026. 12:00 – For some of Dr. Wisher's popular writing on cave art, see here and here.  16:30 – One example of a recent rock art finding in Sulawesi. 20:30  – Our earlier episode with Dr. Eleanor Scerri and Dr. Manuel Will, in which we discuss the mostly-retired idea of a "cognitive revolution" in Europe in the Upper Paleolithic. 22:00 – For more on the recently discovered rock art panel in Colombia, see this news story and this recent academic study. 25:00 – The relative rarity of humans in Paleolithic art has provoked much discussion, both among scholars and the public.  27:00 – On the idea that Venus figurines might be self-representations—made from the perspective of the artist viewing her own body—see here.<