My guess at a reasoning: cavemen had easy access to the animals themselves. Modern people have easy access to videos of animals. (Though, as the 10 percentage-point difference might imply, they don't always use it.) For the time in-between, artists might have thought themselves "above" actually going out and looking at what they're going to depict, instead relying on others' depictions and "common wisdom" to guide them.
That would be my first thought, as well. It seems like a subject that could be very interesting, given a wider dataset. For artists that we have biographical details on, does increased exposure to animals improve their depictions? Are, say, Frederic Remington's renderings mechanically correct?
"Modern" here seems to be pretty broad and consists largely of works made when horse was the main mode of transport. And in fact, works after Muybridge in the 1880s are more accurate than those before. So I don't know if lack of access to quadrupeds would explain it.
On the other hand have we controlled for quadruped type? At a guess, later artworks are largely of horses, and horses' legs are thin and move fast. Mammoths' legs are huge and move slowly, making them easier to observe. Horses also have multiple gaits, and the faster ones are very difficult to observe.
I didn't read thoroughly, so I may have missed this, but it doesn't look like there's any effort to control for the fact that some of the pieces are meant to be artistic rather than an actual depiction.
For example, do memorial statues of horses have physics as their highest priority? It seems like they're just supposed to look pretty, even if they are less accurate in depicting the gait.
Know your animal targets really well comes to mind for a full months worth of meals and/or viable shelter materials could disappear instantly due to a bad throw or lousy trap.
Muybridgean, as in Eadweard Muybridge, and his animal locomotion studies dated, circa 1877, after which artistic assumptions regarding animal behavior had firmer reference material.
I saw an exhibit of da Vinci's sketchbooks which had many sketches of a horse rearing. The early sketches had the musculature of the horse's rump wrong; it showed human musculature. The later ones got it right. Since horses don't rear often, it probably took some time to see enough examples to get this right.
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[ 4.7 ms ] story [ 29.6 ms ] threadOn the other hand have we controlled for quadruped type? At a guess, later artworks are largely of horses, and horses' legs are thin and move fast. Mammoths' legs are huge and move slowly, making them easier to observe. Horses also have multiple gaits, and the faster ones are very difficult to observe.
For example, do memorial statues of horses have physics as their highest priority? It seems like they're just supposed to look pretty, even if they are less accurate in depicting the gait.
Muybridgean, as in Eadweard Muybridge, and his animal locomotion studies dated, circa 1877, after which artistic assumptions regarding animal behavior had firmer reference material.