Could cave art in France be the world’s oldest optical illusion? A new paper argues yes.
The paper’s author, Duncan Caldwell has surveyed the Paleolithic art of several caves in France and discovered a recurring theme that he says can’t be simply accidental. Throughout the cave of Font-de-Gaume, and in examples from other sites as well, drawings and engravings of woolly mammoths and bison often share certain lines or other features, creating overlapping images that can be read first as one animal, then the other. Rarely, if ever, do they do the same with other animals.
While images of horses, deer, extinct cattle, and even rhinos often appear in such caves, and often partially or entirely overlap each other, it is only the mammoth-bison pair that Caldwell found regularly appearing superimposed so exactly. For example in the modern drawing below of an image from Font-de-Gaume, one main body shape, underbelly, and set of legs is adorned with signs of both mammoth and bison heads at both ends. These two large, bulbous, “armor-headed herbivores” which share many physical similarities in life, seem to have had some connection for people in this region in art as well.