Why 15,000-year-old art may have been displayed in firelight (economist.com)

Paywalled

That sounds interesting. I wonder if the video from simulation described in the article is available somewhere?

The cave firelight is fascinating in the film "Cave of Forgotten Dreams" by Werner Herzog, where he documents the art of the Chauvet caves of Southern France.

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1664894/

There are no photos in the article of the Palaeolithic stone plaquettes!

Take a look at them here:

https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal...

scroll through the images at the bottom..

This theory has been around for decades and keeps getting "rediscovered" every few years. I think this newly published finding is additional evidence but it's not a major new discovery.

> That thought would be interesting enough to chew over, but the researchers have gone one hypothesis further: that the fire was more than mere illumination and its flickerings acted to provide a primitive animation to the plaquettes’ carvings.

I just checked, and LED lighting wasn't invented until much later than 15,000 years ago. So, whether they benefited from the primitive animation or not, I am confident they would have displayed their art by firelight anyway.

Paywall. No photos.