Cave Art's Weird And Wonderful Animals

You know, something that occurred to me as I was working on my last cave art video was that whilst I've talked a bunch about the various animal and animal-human hybrid images found within Paleolithic cave art, I've only really talked about a small proportion of the total species we have images for. As I've said elsewhere, something that will jump out at you immediately if you look through collected images from the major European cave art sanctuaries is the sheer dominance of a small number of species such as horses, cattle, ibex, mammoths, wooly rhinos, and deer. Paintings and carvings of each of these species have been found at a large number of sites throughout Europe, and most of its more iconic pieces involve them in some manner. Alongside them, there's also a smattering of different predators to be found, including the famous images of cave bears and lions that have been discovered at sites like Chauvet Cave. Due to the combination of large-scale climate change since the last ice age, and allegedly humans being humans, most of these big guys have either gone extinct or exist today When it comes to these creatures, I feel like there are still quite a few misconceptions floating around in pop culture. Like how for an embarrassingly long time, I believed the propaganda put out by big flintstones that the saber-toothed tiger, or to call it by its actual name, Smilodon, lived in Europe alongside humans and familiar ice age creatures such as woolly mammoths and rhinos. It turns out that whilst they were broadly contemporary with other ice age animals, and probably lived in the same territory as animals such as the Colombian mammoth, Smilodon never made it out of the Americas, and probably never made it far north enough there to encounter that creature's woolly relative. There are other examples of saber-toothed cats that did live in parts of Eurasia and Africa though, and Smilodon, along with other North American big cats like Homotherium and the American lion, may have been encountered by the first peoples to populate the Americas on a mass scale, towards the end of the Pleistocene. It was also thanks to this misconception that before I started researching my first cave art video, my brain somehow decided that many of the felines depicted at sites like Chauvet Cave were in fact saber-toothed cats. Nope, sorry brain, turns out they're cave lions, a species which Smilodon wasn't even that closely related to. Similarly, until recently I didn't realise that woolly mammoths lived in North America, in addition to Eurasia, and I also once thought that they were a lot bigger than they actually were. I also thought for the longest time that they were the extinct ancestor of modern elephants, which, nope, sorry, wrong again brain. I want to revisit these Ice Age megafauna on this channel again someday, as many of them deserve their own in-depth examination. If we put these animals to the side though, it turns out that there's a whole menagerie of other creatures and possible creatures that show up in Paleolithic cave art, and this imagery is by no means limited to the These range from creatures comparable in size to the big lads that I mentioned before, to animals so small and seemingly inconsequential to the world of a Paleolithic hunter-gatherer that their inclusion is interesting in and of itself. Reading about these lesser-known animals made me think it would be fun to do a shortish video covering them, examining a few cool details about the more intriguing ones, and basically doing an impression of a nine-year-old on Too Much Sugar gushing random facts about what animals they like. Then my latent biology degree activated, I ended up doing a whole bunch of extra reading, and now this video is far longer than I intended. On the surface, a discussion of these creatures might not seem like it would take the longest time, given that as I said before, the vast majority of Paleolithic artwork depicts only a small range of animals. But as I learnt over the course of my research, whilst many of cave art's other animals are represented less often, they are often stranger and more controversial, with the identities of some of these images still being disputed today. Let's get started with a site that I mentioned earlier, Chauvet Cave. In addition to containing some of the most beautiful images in all of Paleolithic art, this site also contains a few depictions of animal species that are either unique, or that are found only at a very small number of sites. This includes a claimed image of a creature that you might be surprised to learn was once widespread throughout Paleolithic Europe. This painting is found on a panel near the cave's modern entrance, and depicts an animal outlined in red ochre, whose four quarters feature a number of spots. These spots have led a number of archaeologists to suggest that this image could have been intended to depict the spotted or cave hyena. For anyone unfamiliar, these animals were present in Europe since at least a million years ago, and were once found throughout all but the northern parts of the continent. Despite their name, they also weren't limited to residing in caves, it's just that more of their remains have survived in stable cave ecosystems than out amongst the elements. Whilst these creatures would have resembled modern African hyenas, recent genetic studies have shown that the two species diverged from one another nearly 2.5 million years ago, though they do seem to have interbred occasionally in the time afterwards. They were also a heck of a lot bigger than modern hyenas as an adaptation to the cold, and had shorter limbs that would have rendered them less well equipped for running. According to a 2017 study performed on hyena remains at Los Aprendices cave in eastern Spain, the average cave hyena found there was estimated to weigh around 88 kilograms. Given that modern hyenas are already pretty intimidating, I'm glad that these guys aren't still out there prowling the European countryside. Outside of these differences though, they seem to have filled a similar ecological niche to modern hyenas, acting both as predators and scavengers, and surviving by consuming meat and cracking bones for marrow. Based on some differences in brain size, they might also have been a little less social than African hyenas, who are known for living in large matriarchal clans. As intimidating as these creatures were though, they too would fall victim to the wave of late Pleistocene extinctions, with the last known trace of them having been found in Germany dating from around 24,000 years ago. This relatively early extinction date may explain why only a small amount of cave art imagery has been claimed to depict them, given that the majority of cave art sites date from well after this period. In 2004, a study by Nikolai Spasov and Todor Stoychev argued that in addition to the image at Chovey cave, which they describe as being quote, undoubted, another image has also been found at Lascaux cave's axial gallery that might well depict a hyena. Looking at the image, this could be true given the apparent hair and spot patterns, but the picture is complicated by the creature's elongated neck. Outside of this, Spasov and Stoychev also point to two other images from Le Portel cave and Le Gabelou cave in France as potential depictions of hyenas, though honestly these are so crude that I personally think they could be any feline, with one of them perhaps even resembling a man more than an animal. Others have also dissented from their suggestion that the painting at Lascaux cave represents a hyena. In the Splendour of Lascaux, Norbert Augelard instead argues that this creature may be a distorted horse. Indeed, another horse in the same area includes similar spots and hair patterns, and the strange dimensions of the creature may be due to the unusual features of the wall on which it was painted. And despite Spasov and Stoychev's confident assertions that the image seen at Chovey cave is definitely a hyena, the Chovey team themselves don't seem to have gotten the memo. Instead, in their 2003 work Return to Chovey Cave, they argue that the spot distribution found on this creature doesn't match that of any known modern hyena, whose markings are usually equally distributed over their bodies rather than restricted to their fronts. Spasov and Stoychev do argue that the spots on the rest of the animal could have been washed away due to water damage, but personally I would have thought that this also would have damaged the outline of the creature's hindquarters, which remains completely intact. The Chovey team also note that morphologically the creature resembles the numerous depictions of bears that have been found throughout the complex, which seems reasonable looking at the other bear images that they include. About the only issue I would raise is that as best I can tell, none of the other bears depicted at the site display any signs of spots, but that's far from conclusive. Maybe it was just a fanciful addition by the painting's creator to depict a thicker coat, or maybe some cave bears did have spots, and this is an interesting example of cave art preserving a feature that would remain invisible from examining the creature's remains. That might not be that likely though, given I don't think any surviving species of bears have spots, but hey, I'm not that knowledgeable about the bear necessities. So whilst the jury is still out on what exactly this image depicts, or even if cave hyenas appear in cave art at all, the panel in which it appears features a 2 for 1 deal. That's because just below this pseudo-hyena, there can be found what is currently thought to be the only depiction of a European leopard in cave art. Unlike its neighbour, this depiction is pretty unambiguous, so congratulations Showbay Cave, you have at least one completely unique animal to be found within your artwork. Like the cave hyena, this now extinct subspecies was once widespread throughout much of Europe, living as far north as England. Whilst it first arrived in Europe somewhere between 1.2 million to 600,000 years ago, it only becomes plentiful in the archaeological record after the extinction of the European jaguar around 300,000 years ago. Yeah, there were once jaguars in Europe, how cool is that? Here it would persist in the more temperate parts of the continent until around the same time as the cave hyena, when the deteriorating environmental conditions of the last glacial maximum put pay to its last remaining enclaves. Again, this is probably why we only have one image of it, given how few cave art sites have survived from before its extinction. In terms of its appearance, most scholars argue that this creature highly resembled modern leopards, though many of its discovered remains are on the large size of this animal's size range, and according to scholar Kajus Diedrich, it is thought that it would have preyed on mid-sized animals such as ibex, wild boar and deer. Intriguingly though, going by the painting at Showbay Cave, some of these creatures' markings may have differed from those of present-day leopards. Whilst modern leopards are completely covered by dark rosette-shaped spots, the image at Showbay Cave instead depicts it with a completely white underbelly, similar to that of the related snow leopard. If this was the case, then this is another cool example where cave art was able to capture details of animals that we'd have no way of knowing otherwise. Side note, isn't it remarkable when you stop and really think about it how different the fauna of Ice Age Europe were compared to today? It's wild to think that hyenas, leopards and hulking great bears and lions once stalked the countryside of Europe, and highlights just how transformed our world has become in the last 20,000 years. Ecologically, it's probably not a great thing that a combination of climate change and probably also humans have now wiped out the vast majority of large predators throughout Europe, but part of me is glad that I don't have to deal with dodging cave bears and lions, being laughed at by a hyena the size of a heavyweight boxer, then eaten by a leopard whilst I'm trying to enjoy my holiday in southern France. Outside of these creatures, there's also a couple of depictions of other mid-sized to large European creatures that are still kicking around in parts of the continent, all that in one case has recently been reintroduced. I discussed the handful of images of the wolf and the fox that we know of throughout cave art in my dedicated video on the subject, so I won't bore you by repeating the details here, but check that video out if you're interested. I also mentioned before about how bovines such as the bison and aurochs are amongst the most commonly depicted animals in cave art, being present at many different sites throughout Europe. Alongside these, there is another large bovid that is also occasionally depicted in cave art, the muskox. Images of these creatures include two black charcoal renderings that have been similarly found at Chauvet Cave, along with possible engravings that have been discovered at Lascaux, Comberelles and La Mute caves. As with the aforementioned cave hyena, scholars Nikolai Spasov and Todor Stoychev have attempted to argue that an image of a bovid composed of red dots found at Marcellin Cave in France is also intended to depict a muskox, but most descriptions of the creature I couldn't find identify it simply as a particularly interesting rendering of a bison. This species is named for the heavy odour that its males produce during the mating season, and whilst it resembles a smaller and stockier version of a bison, it's actually more closely related to sheep and goats. The fact that it's slightly smaller than a bison doesn't make it a species to be taken lightly as larger males can still stand up to a good 5 feet tall at the shoulder. It's a bit like saying that an Indian elephant is smaller than an African elephant, both are still more than capable of beating you up. Unlike the previous animals we discussed, this creature was less widespread in Ice Age Europe, though it likely still existed in small populations that ranged as far south as the Iberian Peninsula around the peak of the Lascaux Shoremaximum. In the millennia ahead though, the increasing disappearance of the grasses, woody plants and willows of the mammoth steppe that it relied on to survive saw its range increasingly become restricted to the Arctic Circle. The last European populations died out in Sweden several thousand years ago, along with those in most of Asia, though it would survive until roughly 2,600 years ago on the Tamir Peninsula. Fortunately, it still persists today throughout a wide range of North America, and from the 20th century, small populations have been successfully reintroduced in Norway, Sweden and parts of Alaska, as well as on a much larger scale on Tamir, Wrangell Island and other parts of Northern Siberia. Alongside the muskox, there's also a small bovid that crops up on a few rare occasions in cave art, a creature that I'll admit I hadn't heard of at all prior to researching this video. This is the chamois, a species of goat antelope that is found today throughout the mountainous areas of Southern Europe and Western Asia. On the surface, this creature's attributes might make it seem like it would be difficult to differentiate it from similar bovids such as the ibex, or from deer. Luckily for us though, this creature's distinctive hooked horns, back hair and facial colouring have allowed a small number of images of it to be identified at Caire de Massat and Koski Caves in Southern France, along with Pena de Candamo, Las Chimeneas and El Castillo Caves in Northern Spain. I don't have that much to say about this sturdy little creature. On average, it's just under a metre tall, just over a metre long, weighs about 30-60 kilos and subsists on a diet of highland grasses, herbs and tree bark and needles. Other than that, it's cool to see how well the artists of the time managed to capture its unique characteristics. On top of this, there's also a very small number of claimed depictions of another distinctive antelope, the saiga. You know, those guys with the delightfully massive noses that you've probably seen come up in a nature documentary or two. Like the chamois, they're fairly small, standing between half a metre and a metre tall, and weighing between 30-70 kilos. Back around the time of the last glacial maximum, these creatures could be found grazing on the mammoth steppe throughout much of Northern Eurasia, ranging as far west as Brittany and Cantabria to as far east as Siberia, as well as parts of Northern America. Today though, thanks to human hunting and agricultural development, their populations are largely restricted to Central Asia. Remarkably, unlike most of the other animals from this period, this creature doesn't seem to have suffered too badly from the change in climate, as it now dwells in areas characterised by dry steppe and desert that are a far cry from the conditions of the mammoth steppe it once inhabited. This is thanks to a hidden side benefit of its nose, as it turns out that a huge snozz is just as effective at cooling down and filtering hot dusty air as it would have been at warming up cold air back in the last ice age. During the course of my research, I came across several claims that this animal is depicted on the walls of a number of different cave art sites, including Comberelli Cave in Southern France and Alcheri Cave in Northern Spain. On tracking them down though, it must be said that many of these images seem to me to be less than convincing, and their reception amongst the few scholars that have weighed in on them seems to have been mixed. In a 1993 study, Claude Barrière would rubbish the idea that most of these images represent Saiga, outside of the one found at Comberelli, whilst a more recent study by accepted many of these as genuine representations. Thankfully though, when it comes to portable images, we have a number of carvings that are far less disputable, and engravings from Southern France, Northern Germany and parts of Central Europe all feature the creature's distinctive bulbous nose. In more recent years, engraved images of Saiga have also been claimed to have been found at Koski, La Passiega and Columbia Cave, but I'll hold off on talking about those as I couldn't find many good photographs or reproductions of them. To round up our discussion of the more mid-sized animals then, in the early 20th century, Abbé Henri Breuer also identified three images mixed in amongst the bison and deer at Altamira Cave as wild boars. Since the 1980s though, this identification has become more disputed. In 1987, Professor Leslie Freeman would argue that these creatures were in fact merely bison, and that their boar-like appearance was created by the dimensions of the rock on which they were painted. A few years later though, Professor Patricia C. Rice would in turn dispute his conclusions, and attempted to demonstrate that the body proportions of these unknown creatures is significantly different from those of the other bison. More recently, Paul Barn has also repeatedly argued that these creatures are simply streamlined bison, and that one of the creatures in question clearly has horns, ruling out the idea that it represents a boar. In light of this then, it remains a little uncertain if the humble boar exists at all in cave paintings. The only other image I saw mentioned is a disputed carving that has been claimed to be a boar at Candamo Cave, but alas, I simply can't find any trace of that image online. For the moment then, it seems we have to put the boar in that surprising category of animals that would have been widespread throughout many of the areas where Paleolithic cave painting has been found, only to be largely non-existent in the art of the time. A number of pig images have been found at much earlier Paleolithic sites throughout Indonesia, which may depict a subspecies of wild boar. The problem though is that I can't find any information that ties this subspecies, the banded pig or Indonesian wild boar, to the specific island on which this art has been found, and it may instead depict another local pig species such as the babirusa. Either way though, the extremely early date of these images would mean that not only do wild pigs appear in cave art, currently they're the first animal we know to have been depicted in the history of art. Other than that though, they're boars. They're basically bigger, more aggressive pigs who also happen to have piglets with these adorable stripes. Their various subspecies are found on every continent except Antarctica, either as part of their natural range or due to artificial introductions, and they survive on a diet of basically anything they can get their snouts on. Alongside these larger creatures, there's also a few smaller mammals that pop up in cave art. These include a few images of creatures that are generally identified as mustelids that have been found at sites in France and Spain. The most intriguing for me personally is this charcoal painting of a weasel-like animal from Neau Cave in southwestern France. This elegantly painted image consists of exactly 10 paint strokes, each of which can be individually distinguished against the rock. Whilst the resulting painting successfully captures the live elegance of its subject, this minimalist style also means that it's difficult for us to narrow down exactly which species it's meant to depict. Amongst the few academics that I can find who've weighed in on it recently are Paul Barn in Images of the Ice Age, who describes it as weasel-like, and John Clott in his 2008 work Cave Art, where he claims it to be undoubtedly a weasel. This presents a slight problem to us in trying to narrow down exactly which species they could be referring to, given that the weasel is a name you can also apply to However, for the sake of this video, I'm going to assume that both parties mean the creature most commonly referred to under that name, the leased weasel. This tiny creature is by far the smallest of any animal we're going to talk about today, measuring between 5 to 10 inches in length depending on its location, and it can be found throughout most of the northern hemisphere. Despite their diminutive size, these little fellows are surprisingly deadly predators, tackling prey such as insects, small rodents, birds, and on occasion even hunting creatures far larger than themselves, like young rabbits. The matter of whether this painting represents a weasel is complicated, however, by the discovery of the remains of another mustelid within the same complex, specifically the skeleton of a beach marten. For anyone who was unfamiliar with this animal, like I was before doing my research, it's basically a slightly smaller, more adaptable version of a pine marten. It measures about half a meter long, and lives throughout a variety of environments in Europe and Asia, subsisting on a diet of fruit, small birds, and rodents. In 1971, the presence of these remains led the renowned cave art scholar André Leroy-Gurhan to suggest that this may instead be the animal that the new weasel is intended to depict. However, both John Clott and Robert Simonet would reject this argument in a follow-up article in 1972, noting that rather than these remains having any significance, this creature appears to have accidentally entered the cave network by falling from an upper gallery, then sadly perished when it was unable to find a way out. By retracing its wanderings through the cave complex, and noting the lack of cow sight on its footsteps, they concluded that the marten likely entered the complex sometime after prehistory, long after this image was made. So yeah, we'll just have to presume that this image probably represents a weasel. And speaking of a creature that might want to do its best to stay away from the possible weasel of Nyo, an image of either a rabbit or a hare has been found carved into a wall at Gabayu Cave. At first, I thought that this image would be a similar case to that of the Nyo weasel, where despite the evocative nature of the carving, we have no real way of narrowing down exactly which species it depicts. Luckily though, according to writing in a 1993 publication, we can narrow this down to three potential species that were found in Europe during the Paleolithic, the European rabbit, the European hare, and the mountain hare. Of these, we can likely exclude the rabbit, as it prefers more temperate conditions than those of Northern Europe in the Paleolithic. Whilst the European hare is slightly more suited to colder conditions than the rabbit, Gussan argues that the local conditions point to the mountain hare as the most likely candidate, given that the local Paleolithic faunal remains are dominated by cold-loving species such as reindeer, snowy owls, and ptarmigan. This particular species can still be found today throughout colder, snowy parts of Europe, such as the Alps, parts of Ireland and Northern Britain, Scandinavia, and Russia. Whilst its physiology is similarly adapted for high speed running and endurance as with other hares, it's slightly smaller than its more widespread European cousin, at about half a meter in length, and lacks its characteristic black marks on its tail. In terms of diet, this creature is something of a survivalist, subsisting on grasses in lowland areas, whilst browsing on heather, twigs, and bark in less resource-rich upland areas. It also develops this cool arctic-style white coat in the winter, a trait it shares with the previously mentioned leased weasel. Moving on from mammals, there's also a small number of depictions of birds to be found throughout cave art. Of these, the majority are clearly recognizable as owls. At Chauvet Cave, for example, an image of a bird has been found carved into the wall, that the site's original excavators tentatively identified as being a long-eared owl. These birds are found throughout Eurasia, Northern Africa, and North America, where they largely dwell in open, semi-forested environments, persisting on a varied diet of rodents, small birds, invertebrates, and on rare occasions reptiles and fish. They're about 30-40cm tall, and are both more slender and lighter-bodied than other owls of their size. As their name hints, their trademark feature is their large earslice, which give them a hearing on an order of magnitude better than our own. These ears are also curiously asymmetrical, with the right one being positioned lower than the left, which allows them to absorb sound from both above and below. In his 2008 work, Cave Art, Dr. Jean-Claude would go so far as to suggest that this owl was actually drawn with its back to the viewer, in order to depict another of this creature's famous attributes, the ability to turn its head 180 degrees clockwise. Whilst this argument does seem speculative to me, the lines that make up this creature's feathered lower half are suggestive of the creature's tucked wings, rather than its front, so it does seem like a possibility. Carvings of owls of less determinate species have also been found throughout other sites in France, including this image from La Troie Frere of two owls that are depicted alongside a vaguely humanoid figure, that may be an attempt at a hatchling. Elsewhere, there's also a single depiction of another bird species to be found in a part of Europe that we haven't really had a chance to talk about when it comes to cave art, England. Part of the reason for this might be because for a long time, it was actually thought that there was no evidence of cave art to be found in the UK at all. This changed in 2003 with the discovery of over 80 carved images at Church Hole and Robin Hood's Cave at the wider site of Cresswell Crags. Alongside images of stags, bison and other bovids, here a distinctive image of a bird with a narrow neck and elongated beak has been found engraved on the rock. Initially, scholars Paul Barne, Paul Pettit and Sergio Ripoll compared it to a swan or a crane, before later likening its proportions to an ibis. Based on this, I had a quick look around the different species of ibis to see if I could narrow down a potential candidate, but it turns out there's quite a lot of them, with all sorts of different origin points and ranges. I do know that the Gorsey Ibis has been an occasional visitor to the UK in more recent times, but I wasn't able to find any information on whether this creature would have been present during the Paleolithic. Apart from these modern bird species, we also see one popping up that you wouldn't really expect, which is… penguins? Okay, so if you look at the results of your average Google search, you might come across the claim that Kosky Cave in southern France contains images of penguins. These paintings date back from around 18,000 years ago and consist of three charcoal sketches of birds with bulbous bodies and short heads and wings. Their identifications as penguins, though, appear to have been either due to a misreading of past academic interpretations of what these creatures represent, or maybe someone without much knowledge of the image just looked at it and thought, that sure looks like a penguin to me. In reality, though, the birds we know as penguins today have always been limited to the southern hemisphere, and there's no indication that they ever managed to make their way this far north. But here's the thing, these might actually be penguins, if you stretch the definition of penguin to the point of breaking. Going by the small number of academics that have weighed in on the identity of these images, then a leading candidate for the creatures depicted here is the great auk. This distinctive looking seabird stood about 70cm tall, and probably weighed about 5kg. This made it the largest of the Alcid group of birds, which includes auklets, murres, and such familiar names as puffins and guillemots. In historical times, these fellows could still be found throughout much of the northern Atlantic, and often ranged far from land to fish for menhaden and capelin. Unfortunately for it, though, its eggs, meat and hides became a prized commodity amongst Europeans from the 16th century onwards. You see, whilst the great auk was an excellent swimmer, it was completely flightless, which meant that it usually roosted in low-lying ledges that were easily accessible by hunters. It went extinct in the early 19th century, and I'll give you three guesses exactly who is responsible. As to whether these images actually depict great auks, a small number of academics did weigh in on this issue back when Kosci Cave was first being publicised in the 90s. John Clott and John Cautin would be the first to make this identification in a 1991 article shortly after the site's discovery, after initially mistakenly labelling them as penguins, and would expand on this opinion in their authoritative book, The Cave Beneath the Sea. This argument was similarly echoed by Francesco D'Erico in a 1994 article, where he noted that great auk remains have been found at a number of sites throughout the Mediterranean, dating back to the time when these paintings were created. He also points to another carving of a bird found at El Pendo Cave by Abbe Henri Breuer in 1912, which he claims clearly represents a great auk. This interpretation would be disputed though in a 1995 discussion by scholars Ann and Michael Eastham, who argued that whilst this evidence increases the possibility that the creature represented in the Kosci images is the great auk, there is no simple match to be made between the creatures painted at Paleolithic sites and the species represented in local remains. Due to these arguments, today most scholars seem content to identify these images more generally as seabirds, or as part of the wider auk family without making assumptions about their greatness or lack thereof. But Charles, you might be thinking, where does the whole penguin thing come into this? Well, if these images do indeed depict great auks, then they also technically depict penguins. Something I didn't realise until I looked into this topic is that the great auk was technically a penguin, or at least, a penguinus. You see, the great auk was known to Europeans as the penguin far earlier than the flightless birds we're familiar with, and this is reflected in the scientific name for the species, Penguinus impennis. Yeah, another fun fact I learned making this video, the reason penguins are called penguins is because people thought they looked like these guys. Penguin is also still the name for them in French, so between these two facts, I think I can get away with saying that a type of penguin does appear in cave art. Sticking with the theme of marine animals, Kosky Cave also has a trove of other claimed images. During their examinations of the site in the early 90s, John Kott and John Kortin would claim to have discovered eight engravings of creatures that they identified as seals. If these identifications are correct, then I'm not sure which exact seal species they could depict, as the only other source I could find on these engravings was Paul Barne describing them as doubtful in images of the ice age. Today, the only surviving seal in the region is the Mediterranean monk seal, a species that as far as we know is sadly down to less than a thousand individuals. Complicating matters is the fact that both the harbour seal and the grey seal were formerly present throughout the western Mediterranean during the Paleolithic, so there isn't much way for us to narrow this down further. On top of these possible seal images, it has also been claimed since at least the 1960s that a number of red ochre paintings that near her cave also depict seals, though over the decades other archaeologists have argued that these images more likely depict dolphins. Personally though, I think that these images may be more likely to depict seals, especially as according to a 2017 study, Mediterranean monk seal remains have been unearthed from Paleolithic middens associated with the site. Outside of orcs and seals, a number of curious geometric patterns in Kosky Cave have also tentatively been identified by the science excavators as depictions of jellyfish or even possible octopi. This would be remarkable if true, but sadly given the anatomical vagaries of the images, we again don't have any way of knowing for sure. On top of this possible marine life, there are also other cave art sanctuaries that contain examples of both fresh and saltwater fish. One of these has been found in the Dordogne Department of France at the Abri du Poisson, which translates to the much less impressive sounding The Fish Shelter. Here a carved image of a large fish has been found that Paul Barn argues is an image of a male salmon in a state of exhaustion after spawning. To support his argument, he points to the distinctive hook shape to this creature's lower jaw, a feature known as a kipe that develops in some salmon species during the spawning season. Whilst I initially found this interpretation a little suspect given the lack of detail around the creature's jaws, it turns out that similar features can also be found on portable engravings of salmon found at both Les Toucs d'Hubert and Lavash Caves, lending more weight to this identification. A carving of a fish resembling a salmon has also been found at the coastal El Pindal Cave in northern Spain, this time with a spectacularly elongated tail. Alongside these potential salmon, a large black charcoal image has also been found at La Pileta Cave in southern Spain that resembles some type of flat fish. If you search for this creature online, you'll find people describing it as an Atlantic halibut, but sadly we don't really have any way of narrowing it down. So that's just about all the unusual creatures that I can find kicking around in European cave arts. I should say that even after nearly 40 minutes of discussing these creatures, we are still far from covering the That's because if we look at portable artwork, then there's another list of even more exotic creatures that I haven't started to look at here. These include potential whales, tortoises, grasshoppers, many more fish, a whole host of different bird and insect species, wolverines, and much less disputable boars and seals, and even more speculative identifications like a salamander, a turtle, snakes, and even a potential frog. To avoid this video devolving into being even more of a big list of random animals I find interesting though, I think we'll leave things here for today. Feel free to check out some of those other ones for yourself though. And before we finish entirely, let's examine one of the more undoubtedly strange figures to appear in all of cave art. This is the enigmatic creature known as the unicorn that has been discovered at Lascaux Cave. I mentioned it briefly in my Cave Art is Cool video last year, and probably included it on whatever clickbait thumbnail I settled on for this video too. This figure is part of Lascaux's most famous composition, the Hall of the Bulls, and consists of a four-legged creature with long straight horns that doesn't fully resemble any of the other bovines, deer, or horses that are found in the same panel. Over the decades a whole range of different explanations have been trotted out to describe its characteristics, some of which seem to me like more of a reach than the others. Despite its popular name, it does in fact have two horns, and whilst some earlier archaeologists have claimed that the lines that make them up may not have been intended to be part of the same creature, more recent analysis has confirmed that they probably always comprise part of its outline. Outside of these horns, this creature is also marked by an elongated, undulating body, along with a number of black spots that resemble those of a feline. It's for this reason that historically many cave art scholars argue that this creature was meant to resemble a big cat of some type. As Norbert Aujelas notes in The Splendor of Lascaux though, nowadays most scholars tend to categorise this creature as a type of hybrid fantasy animal, rather than attempting to directly equate it to an existing animal. In their 1990 work Discovering Lascaux, Giles and Brigette Deluc would describe it as having the body of a rhinoceros, the withers of a bear or bison, the head and spots of a big cat, and the tail of a horse. That isn't to say though that there haven't been other interpretations of this figure over the decades since the site's discovery. In his 1967 work Treasures of Prehistoric Art, Andre Leroy-Gurhan would describe it as resembling either a feline or two people wearing an animal skin, and a number of other scholars have explored the idea that it may depict some sort of shamanic being. John Closs would point to its existence, along with other composite figures, as part of his arguments for his fringe shamanistic theory of cave art. Whilst as Paul Barn notes in Images of the Ice Age, some scholars have interpreted the whole panel as a scene of a shamanic figure driving its animals before him. Personally, I'm not sure what to think of this creature. Part of me wants to chalk it up to just a stylised attempt at depicting an aurochs. After all, whilst the creature's body proportions are unusual, they're not a world away from the dimensions of one of the larger aurochs on the same panel, and its mouth and nostrils are also depicted with a similar style of separation as some of the surrounding bovines. The other elements such as the horns and spots do give me pause though, and I must admit that I couldn't find any other examples of aurochs from the complex to have any similar type of distortion. Interestingly, Norbert Asgerland also notes that some of the other carnivores seen in the complex, such as bears and lions, do have a degree of stylisation in their depiction. So, yeah, maybe it could be some kind of feline or a deliberate attempt at a composite animal. Let me know what you think it could be in the comments. So there you go, that's every major creature of consequence that we're going to examine here today. The big question that hovers over these more rarely depicted animals that I haven't addressed so far though, is why were these animals painted less frequently than others? Well, the answer, as with many other questions surrounding cave art, is that we can't really be sure. What makes things more difficult is that I also couldn't really find much in a way of discussion amongst archaeologists on this subject, other than the general conclusion that this selection of species doesn't appear to have been random. To speculate a little then, it's possible that these creatures appear only rarely because they played little to no part in the belief systems of most Paleolithic humans, as most of them appear to have been neither regular prey species or dangerous predators that humans would have wanted to avoid. Even then though, it's possible that some of them could have come to hold meaning for specific peoples or populations, rather than Paleolithic artists as a whole, which could explain their occasional depictions. Some of these less common representations also appeared during the Magdalenian, a time when many species of megafauna were starting to go extinct, and the hunter-gatherers of Europe were broadening the range of food species they exploited, so perhaps some of them gained new significance as a result. As we discussed in my Cave Art is Cool video though, we should be careful not to place too much importance on the idea that Paleolithic artists' choice were dictated by the creatures they hunted, given that we know of sites such as Nyo Cave where the most common animals depicted differed from those of the local faunal remains. A last point I also want to zero in on before we conclude is one suggested by both John Clott and John Curtin in The Cave Beneath the Sea, which is that outside of the now partially submerged Kosky Cave and possibly Nerha Cave, we don't have much in the way of surviving coastal sites where cave art is preserved. This is for the simple reason that sea levels have vastly increased since the last glacial maximum, destroying many coastal sites and leaving others buried so deep beneath the oceans that they become difficult to detect. Going by the imagery seen at the two sites we do have, it seems possible to me that marine life could potentially have played a greater role in the imagery painted by coastal communities, or at least more so than those found at surviving inland sites. If it exists though, then it's a world that's now sadly lost beneath the waves.