'Man is a great miracle', the art historian Gombrich was moved to say, when writing about the newly discovered paintings at the Chauvet and Cosquer caves (Gombrich 1996, 8). The paintings of Chauvet, especially, dating to about 30,000 years ago, have prompted many people to marvel at this early flowering of the modern human mind. Here, it has seemed, is clear evidence of a new kind of mind at work: a mind that, after so long a childhood in the old stone-age, had grown up as the mature, cognitively fluid, mind we know today.
(...)

The paintings and engravings must surely strike anyone as wondrous. Still, I draw attention here to evidence that suggests that the miracle they represent may not be at all of the kind most people think. Indeed this evidence suggests the very opposite: that the makers of these works of art may actually have had distinctly pre-modern minds, have been little given to symbolic thought, have had no great interest in communication and have been essentially self-taught and untrained. Cave art, so far from being the sign of a new order of mentality, may perhaps better be thought the swan-song of the old.

thanks to wood s lot