Cave Paintings Trivia
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49 free Cave Paintings trivia questions with answers — history quiz, new questions added Sep 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 49 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
Parietal art takes its name from the Latin paries, 'wall', the same root behind the parietal bones that wall in the top of the skull.
Q 02The Sahara's Cave of Swimmers, found by explorer László Almásy in 1933, features in which Oscar-winning film?
The English Patient
The English Patient makes a fictional Almásy its hero and rebuilt the cave as a set. The real explorer argued its swimming figures proved the Sahara was once wet, a radical idea later borne out.
Q 03Besides the paint itself, what on a cave wall can be carbon-dated to show when artists were there?
Torch marks
Torch marks are charcoal, so they hold datable carbon. At Chauvet, smears left where visitors rubbed their torches on the walls helped prove the art was far older than anyone expected.
Q 04Which subjects appear most often in prehistoric cave paintings?
Big game like bison, horses and deer
Big game like bison, horses and deer fill the walls while people barely appear: humans are rare in cave art, and usually crude sketches beside the lifelike animals.
Q 05Which pigments did cave painters typically use?
Ochre, hematite, manganese oxide and charcoal
Ochre, hematite, manganese oxide and charcoal gave the reds, yellows and blacks. The charcoal proved a gift to science, since its carbon let labs date Chauvet's black drawings directly.
Q 06Bones show Lascaux's artists mostly ate which animal, yet it appears just once on the cave's walls?
Reindeer
Reindeer bones far outnumber all others dug from Lascaux's floor, yet a single engraved reindeer hides among some 600 animals, most of them horses. The walls were never a menu.
Q 07A 2012 study found cave artists depicted what more accurately than modern artists?
The walking gait of four-legged animals
The walking gait of four-legged animals was wrong in 46% of prehistoric pictures but in 84% of later art, until Muybridge's 1880s photographs showed painters how legs really move.
Q 08How were the negative hand stencils found in caves worldwide made?
Paint blown around a hand
Paint blown around a hand pressed to the rock left its outline. Many stencils lack finger joints, and scholars still argue whether the fingers were lost to frostbite or ritual, or simply bent as a code.
Q 09Early 20th-century scholars such as Henri Breuil interpreted cave paintings as what?
Hunting magic to increase prey
Hunting magic to increase prey was suggested by bison drawn with arrow-like marks on their flanks. The idea faded as new caves showed few animals marked that way, and few of the species people actually ate.
Q 10Dean Snow measured finger lengths in Ice Age hand stencils and concluded that most were made by whom?
Women
Women left about three-quarters of the stencils he could measure in eight French and Spanish caves, he concluded in 2013, upending the old assumption that the first artists were men.
Q 11In 2023 a London furniture conservator argued that dots and lines in Ice Age cave art recorded what?
When the animals mated
When the animals mated, counted in lunar months from the start of spring, was Ben Bacon's reading. A Y-shaped sign he took to mean 'giving birth' was the clue, and the academics who tested it called the marks a step towards writing.
Q 12A 2018 study dated red markings in three Spanish caves to 64,000 years ago and credited them to whom?
Neanderthals
Neanderthals were the only people in Europe then, as modern humans arrived some 20,000 years later. Critics dispute the dating, so whether Neanderthals ever painted is still argued over.
Q 13On which Indonesian island are the Maros-Pangkep cave paintings called the oldest known depiction of storytelling?
Q 21Lascaux cave lies near the village of Montignac in which French department?
Dordogne
Dordogne is thick with Ice Age sites: the same Vézère valley holds the Cro-Magnon rock shelter, which gave Europe's first modern humans their name. UNESCO listed the valley's painted caves in 1979.
Q 22Who found the painted cave of Lascaux in September 1940?
Four teenage boys
Four teenage boys widened a hole on the hill above Montignac and slid in with a home-made lamp. Legend said a tunnel there led to the local manor; they found painted walls instead and told their old schoolteacher.
Q 23Lascaux's only human figure has the head of what?
A bird
Sulawesi
Sulawesi's Leang Karampuang cave holds a scene of three human-like figures around a large animal, painted at least 51,200 years ago. Such finds overturned the belief that picture-making began in Ice Age Europe.
Q 14Announced in 2021 and dated to at least 45,500 years, the painting in Indonesia's Leang Tedongnge cave shows what animal?
A warty pig
A warty pig, life-size in dark red ochre with two hand prints above its back, seems to be watching two other pigs square up. It was the oldest known picture of an animal until an older scene was dated nearby in 2024.
Q 15Dated in 2018 to at least 40,000 years, the animal painting in Lubang Jeriji Saléh cave is on which island?
Borneo
Borneo's faded orange beast is probably a banteng, a wild cow that still roams the island's jungles. It was briefly the oldest known picture of anything, before older paintings were dated on a neighbouring island.
Q 16The oldest known drawing, 73,000-year-old ochre lines from Blombos Cave, is likened to what?
A hashtag
A hashtag is what the crossed red lines resemble. They were drawn with a pointed ochre crayon on a stone flake the size of two thumbnails, and run off its edges, so the design was once bigger.
Q 17In 2011, DNA from Ice Age bones showed which odd feature of Pech Merle's painted horses was true to life?
Their spotted coats
Their spotted coats had looked like fantasy or symbolism until six of 31 ancient horses tested carried the gene for leopard spotting. The painters, it turned out, had simply drawn what they saw.
Q 18On Chauvet's Panel of the Horses, which two animals stand horn to horn, just as real males fight in the wild?
Woolly rhinos
Woolly rhinos square up with horns crossed, a rare scene of behaviour in Ice Age art. Chauvet's artists favoured dangerous beasts that were rarely hunted: lions, mammoths, rhinoceroses and bears are nearly two-thirds of its animals.
Q 19What is Chauvet Cave named after?
One of its discoverers
One of its discoverers, Jean-Marie Chauvet, gave the cave his name. He and two friends found it in December 1994 by following a faint draught, which cavers read as a sign of open space ahead.
Q 20Why did Chauvet's paintings survive untouched until cavers squeezed inside in 1994?
A rockfall had sealed the entrance
A rockfall had sealed the entrance during the Ice Age, shutting out people and bears alike. The soft clay floor still holds cave-bear paw prints and the footprints of a child who walked through by torchlight.
A bird's head tops the stick man at the bottom of Lascaux's Shaft, who lies beside a speared animal with a bird on a pole close by. Whether it shows a hunting accident or a shaman's trance is still argued.
Q 24What is the most famous chamber of Lascaux, dominated by four black aurochs, called?
The Hall of the Bulls
The Hall of the Bulls is named for aurochs painted some five metres long, far bigger than life. Its famous 'unicorn' is misnamed, since the creature plainly has two horns.
Q 25Why was Lascaux closed to the public in 1963?
Visitors were damaging the art
Visitors were damaging the art: up to 100,000 a year brought heat, damp and carbon dioxide, and green algae began creeping over the walls. A partial replica opened nearby in 1983.
Q 26Which director took 3D cameras into Chauvet Cave for the 2010 documentary Cave of Forgotten Dreams?
Werner Herzog
Werner Herzog won rare permission from France's culture ministry to film in the sealed cave with a tiny crew. He chose 3D so that viewers could see how the painters worked the curves of the rock into their animals.
Q 27Cambridge researchers found in 2011 that many finger-drawn lines in France's Rouffignac cave were made by whom?
Young children
Young children, some as small as three, trailed their fingers through the soft clay 13,000 years ago. Marks high on the ceiling show adults lifted them up, and the busiest artist was a girl of about five.
Q 28Who first pointed out the paintings on the Altamira ceiling to Marcelino Sanz de Sautuola in 1879?
His eight-year-old daughter María
His eight-year-old daughter María looked up and spotted them while he dug in the floor for stone tools. He had been exploring the cave for years without once noticing its ceiling.
Q 29What did Émile Cartailhac do in 1902, after years of calling Altamira a fake?
Published an apology
Published an apology: his article 'Mea culpa of a sceptic' appeared once similar finds in France had made Altamira impossible to deny. It came 14 years too late for Sautuola, who had died branded a fraud.
Q 30Altamira's Polychrome Ceiling famously depicts a herd of which extinct animal?
Steppe bison
Steppe bison crowd the low ceiling, and the painters set many of them over natural bulges in the rock, so that the animals' bodies swell out in three dimensions.