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50 free Cave Paintings trivia questions with answers — history quiz, new questions added Aug 2026.
This cave paintings trivia quiz covers the oldest art humans ever made, from a hand stencil in Indonesia dated to at least 67,800 years to the polychrome bison of Altamira. The easy questions are the ones any curious student should manage: which animals appear most often, which pigments were used, which famous French cave was found by teenagers and a dog, and why the originals are now closed. From there it digs into the archaeology: the Spanish caves whose red symbols were made by Neanderthals, the pig hunt in Sulawesi that counts as the earliest storytelling, the eight-year-old girl who spotted the Altamira ceiling, the sceptic who published his 'mea culpa', the cliff collapse that sealed Chauvet for 29,000 years, the 829 left hands of Argentina's Cueva de las Manos, the cave you enter 37 metres underwater, the kangaroo dated by wasp nests, and the theory that dots and lines were a lunar calendar. Every answer was checked against encyclopaedia entries on cave painting and the individual sites before publishing, and the supporting sentence is stored with each question. If you enjoy this one, try our Stone Age, ancient history and art history quizzes next.
30 of 50 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Cave paintings belong to which broader category of art, which also includes engravings on cave walls?
Parietal art
The term usually implies a prehistoric origin.
Q 02Roughly how many caves containing prehistoric art have been found in France and Spain?
Nearly 350
Early dating was contentious because cave debris from many eras contaminates radiocarbon samples.
Q 03Besides sampling pigment, what traces left by cave painters' lighting can be dated to establish a painting's age?
Torch marks
Carbonate deposits forming on top of paintings can also give a minimum age.
Q 04Which subjects appear most often in prehistoric cave paintings?
Big game like bison, horses and deer
Plants account for less than 1% of the symbols depicted in European cave art.
Q 05Which pigments did cave painters typically use?
Ochre, hematite, manganese oxide and charcoal
Sometimes the animal's silhouette was incised into the rock before painting.
Q 06Curiously, the painters of Lascaux left mainly the bones of which animal, yet never painted it?
Reindeer
Horses are the most common species on the Lascaux walls.
Q 07A 2012 study found cave artists depicted what more accurately than modern artists?
The walking gait of four-legged animals
Close observation of prey animals mattered for survival.
Q 08How were the negative stencils of hands found in caves worldwide made?
Pigment sprayed around a hand held to the wall
Many stencils show a finger wholly or partly missing, for which several explanations have been offered.
Q 09Early 20th-century scholars such as Henri Breuil interpreted cave paintings as what?
Hunting magic to increase prey
David Lewis-Williams later argued they were visions painted by shamans in trance.
Q 10Dean Snow's study of hand stencils at Pech Merle suggested many were made by whom?
Women
R. Dale Guthrie had argued adolescent males made much of the art, based on hand-print analysis.
Q 11A 2022 study by amateur archaeologist Bennett Bacon proposed that dots and lines in cave art recorded what?
Animal mating cycles in a lunar calendar
A recurring 'Y' symbol was proposed to mean 'to give birth', making the marks a possible proto-writing system.
Q 12Who must have made the 64,000-year-old red symbols in Spain's Maltravieso, Ardales and La Pasiega caves?
Neanderthals
They predate the arrival of modern humans in Europe by at least 20,000 years.
Q 13On which Indonesian island are the Maros-Pangkep cave paintings called the oldest known depiction of storytelling?
Sulawesi
Q 21Lascaux cave lies near the village of Montignac in which French department?
Dordogne
It joined the UNESCO World Heritage List in 1979 with the other decorated caves of the Vézère valley.
Q 22Who discovered the entrance to Lascaux in September 1940?
A teenager whose dog nosed into a hole
He returned with three friends and climbed down a 15-metre shaft they thought led to Lascaux Manor.
Q 23Roughly how many figures does Lascaux contain?
Nearly 6,000
They fall into three groups: animals, human figures and abstract signs; over 600 are painted.
The Leang Karampuang scene, 91 by 38 cm, was dated to about 51,200 years in a 2024 Nature paper.
Q 14A 2021 discovery at Leang Tedongnge cave, dated to at least 45,500 years, depicts what animal?
A warty pig
It is also the earliest evidence of human settlement in the region, and is deteriorating due to climate change.
Q 15The 40,000-year-old figurative painting found in 2018 in Lubang Jeriji Saléh cave is on which island?
Borneo
It depicts an unknown animal and may be as old as 52,000 years.
Q 16The oldest known rock painting, 73,000-year-old ochre lines, was found at which South African site?
Blombos Cave
The small rock fragment was found in 2011 among spear points and took seven years of testing to confirm.
Q 17Which Spanish cave holds Europe's earliest known figurative paintings, dated to at least 40,000 BC?
El Castillo
Before that 2012 study, Chauvet in France was thought to hold the oldest.
Q 18Radiocarbon dates show that Chauvet Cave was painted in two periods - roughly when?
35,000 and 30,000 years ago
Many paintings were modified repeatedly over thousands of years.
Q 19Chauvet Cave, discovered in December 1994, lies in which French department?
Ardèche
It is named for Jean-Marie Chauvet, one of three speleologists who first explored it.
Q 20Why did Chauvet's paintings survive untouched until 1994?
A cliff collapse sealed the entrance 29,000 years ago
The clay floor still holds cave-bear paw prints and the hollows where the bears slept.
Q 24What is the most famous chamber of Lascaux, dominated by four black aurochs, called?
The Hall of the Bulls
One enigmatic animal there, with two straight lines on its forehead, is nicknamed the 'unicorn'.
Q 25In which year was the original Lascaux cave closed to the public because its condition was deteriorating?
1963
Lascaux II, a replica of the Hall of the Bulls and Painted Gallery, opened nearby in 1983.
Q 26Lascaux IV, a full-scale replica of the entire cave, opened in December 2016 as part of what?
The International Centre for Parietal Art
It stands 400 m from the original on the same hill above Montignac.
Q 27The Cave of Altamira lies near which town in Cantabria, Spain?
Santillana del Mar
Its earliest paintings date back around 36,000 years.
Q 28Who first pointed out the paintings on the Altamira ceiling to Marcelino Sanz de Sautuola in 1879?
His eight-year-old daughter María
The cave itself had been found in 1868 by tiler Modesto Cubillas.
Q 29Which French prehistorian, having ridiculed Altamira, published 'Mea culpa d'un sceptique' in 1902?
Émile Cartailhac
Sautuola's claims had been loudly mocked at the 1880 Prehistorical Congress in Lisbon.
Q 30Altamira's Polychrome Ceiling famously depicts a herd of which extinct animal?
Steppe bison
Two horses, a large doe and possibly a wild boar share the ceiling.