Was pre-historic cave art only done in caves?

Diana - I'm Diana O'Carroll and I'm a PhD research student and Naked Scientist. I think that the sort of art found in caves was almost certainly done out in the open. Unfortunately we can't prove this, but we can look at how cave art does survive and what other things humans were up to at the time.

The kind of art the questioner is talking about tended to appear around the Upper Palaeolithic era in Europe (which was from about 50-60,000 years ago). And these include drawings of bison or people, dots and silhouettes of hands and even a few seemingly random scribbles, with some of the more famous examples found at places like El Castillo or Chauvet or Lascaux. The problem with paintings is that often they can be washed away by rain, or they can be blown away by wind carrying tiny particles which abrade the surface of the rock. Hannah - So caves provide protection from the outside elements. Other than wind and rain, are there other ways caves protect prehistoric artwork?

Diana - As for caves, providing the rocks they're made of aren't too acidic, they're great areas for preserving both organic and inorganic organic materials - so that includes the charcoal-based outlines and the pigments, which were usually made of earth minerals like red or yellow ochre. Caves tend to stay at the same temperature, they have constant humidity and sometimes contain limited amounts of oxygen - all of which creates a fairly stable environment in which to preserve whatever people have left behind. More importantly, caves tend to fill up or become blocked, meaning that people can't get inside them and destroy the art. My favourite example is the Grotte Cosquer, which is so tricky to access that several divers died trying to navigate its underwater entrance - but its remoteness kept the paintings safe for thousands of years.

Hannah - That was Diana O'Carroll from Cambridge with her favourite prehistoric artwork in Marseille, France. But not all prehistoric art is restricted to caves. Evan AU, Clifford K and Cifrum add on the forum, alongside Diana, that stone carving and sculpture are another form of human art. And at Ayers rock in Australia petroglyphs exist , shallow carvings of abstract lines or animals and strange, unidentifiable creatures. These are thought to be around 40, 000 years old and found across other parts of Australia, Africa, Asia, the Americas as well as Europe, somehow managing to survive out in the open.