WERE CAVE PAINTINGS ABSTRACT ART?

WERE CAVE PAINTINGS ABSTRACT ART? Years ago we spent an afternoon at Lascaux II, the reconstruction of the the Lascaux cave paintings that tourists are allowed to visit. The guide who gave a lecture on the paintings attached great importance to the patterns of dots and lines in the paintings. Apparently—his English was heavily accented and we struggled with it—the guide was very interested in the semiotics of the paintings, speculating on what the signs meant. Young Nick used to do a riff on his explanations of the dots and the lines. There has apparently been a continuing debate about the extent to which cave paintings in general are abstract or realistic. For example, this wikipedia article on Lascaux says: “Nigel Spivey, a professor of classic art and archeology at the University of Cambridge, has further postulated in his series, How Art Made the World, that dot and lattice patterns overlapping the representational images of animals are very similar to hallucinations provoked by sensory-deprivation.”