Overlooked Ice Age Cave Art in Spain Could Be the World’s Oldest Cartoon

Unfortunately, this story has no Manny, Sid, or Diego.

Long before the animated motion picture Ice Age became a household name, people who lived through the real Ice Age may have been experimenting with animation themselves. Using sharp tools, prehistoric artists apparently tried to capture animals in motion, carving heads and limbs in different positions as if creating the world’s earliest cartoons.

These prehistoric “animations” lay hidden in a Spanish cave for thousands of years, overlooked even by tourists who walked right past them and sometimes carved graffiti over the ancient artwork.

In a new study, archaeologists describe 280 engravings at Cova de la Font Major in Catalonia, including 55 animal figures. Coauthor Míriam Salas-Altès suggested that nearly 20 markings might have been intended as “a movie or animation.”

The discovery began with tourists in wetsuits.

On October 30, 2019, archaeologist Josep Maria Vergès was working at Cova de la Font Major in Catalonia when he noticed a group of visitors emerging from a side passage. They were taking part in an adventure tour of the cave, and Vergès, unfamiliar with that particular gallery, decided to investigate.

Inside, he found walls covered in names and dates scratched by visitors over the decades. He removed his helmet and directed his headlamp sideways across the rock. The light cast shadows inside the shallow grooves, revealing lines that looked remarkably ancient.

As he moved his light across the wall, the outline of a horse suddenly emerged. More animals followed.

What made the discovery extraordinary was that the cave was hardly unexplored. People had visited it for centuries, tourists had been entering regularly since 1957, and it became an official attraction in 1993. Yet thousands of visitors had walked past the Ice Age engravings without recognizing their true worth. Some had even carved their names directly over the prehistoric artwork.

The explanation was partly a trick of the light. The engravings become difficult to distinguish when illuminated from straight ahead, as visitors normally do. Shine a light from the side, however, and the ancient figures emerge from the shadows.

This extraordinary cave had been hiding its treasures in plain sight.

A Stone Age Cinema?

What might these panel sequences have looked like without film, screens, or even paper?

According to Salas-Altès, speaking to Nature, some figures have lowered heads, while others feature limbs repeated in different positions, possibly to suggest running. An artist may have captured several moments of movement at once.

The engravings are obviously static, but one can tell the artist’s intent was to express some kind of animation — and the idea of such prehistoric artistry has precedent.

In a 2012 Antiquity study, archaeologist Marc Azéma and artist Florent Rivère argued that cave artists in France sometimes superimposed legs or heads to convey motion. At Chauvet Cave, for example, an eight-legged bison might depict a running animal in overlapping poses, pictured below.

The researchers from this 2012 study also proposed that prehistoric people may have invented a primitive form of animation using small, circular bone discs. Some discs, found at archaeological sites in France, have a hole through the center and different images engraved on each side. One particularly intriguing example, discovered at Laugerie-Basse, depicts a chamois standing on one side and lying down on the other.

By threading a string through the hole and spinning the disc rapidly, the images appear to alternate, creating the illusion of an animal moving between two positions. The principle resembles a thaumatrope, a popular 19th-century optical toy.

The Catalan artists may have employed another visual trick: making the cave itself part of the picture. One horse stands on a natural boundary in the rock that resembles a ground line. Another carving shows a doe lowering her muzzle toward a crack that might represent water.

“If this hypothesis is correct, the scene would constitute one of the earliest known representations of water in human artistic expression,” Salas-Altès told New Scientist.

A Different Genre

The engravings also include wild cattle, goats or sheep, deer, and an unusually detailed bear with front-facing ears and a slightly open mouth. Other markings are less recognizable, such as parallel strokes, some grouped in sets of up to 40, and looping lines whose age remains uncertain.

How old is the art? Nobody has directly dated the animal engravings. Charcoal and a flint tool place people in the cave around 26,000 years ago, while other traces indicate earlier visits. Stylistic comparisons suggest many figures are more than 19,000 years old, but the markings need not all be the same age.

The bigger surprise is where they were found. Before this discovery, archaeologists knew of only two possible Ice Age cave-art images in all of Catalonia (Cova del Tendo and Cova de la Taverna). Cova de la Font Major now ranks as the third-largest known assemblage in Mediterranean Iberia by its number of animal figures. The researchers also see signs of a distinctive regional style, suggesting the area had a richer artistic culture than previously assumed.

“It is exciting that new discoveries at long-visited sites are revealing ancient evidence of a very early painting tradition,” Paul Taçon, an archaeologist at Griffith University in Australia who was not involved in the study, told New Scientist.

Whether these artists intended to create animation remains uncertain. But the discovery shows that Ice Age people were finding surprisingly inventive ways to depict the world around them.

The study was published in the journal Antiquity.

A Stone Age Cinema?

A Different Genre

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