What Is Paleolithic Art?: Cave Paintings and the Dawn of Human Creativity

Book: What Is Paleolithic Art?: Cave Paintings and the Dawn of Human Creativity / Link 2 (Google preview) 
Jean Clottes
Paperback: 208 pages
Publisher: University Of Chicago Press (April 12, 2016)

Was it a trick of the light that drew our Stone Age ancestors into caves to paint in charcoal and red hematite, to watch the heads of lions, likenesses of bison, horses, and aurochs in the reliefs of the walls, as they flickered by firelight? Or was it something deeper—a creative impulse, a spiritual dawn, a shamanistic conception of the world efflorescing in the dark, dank spaces beneath the surface of the earth where the spirits were literally at hand?

In this book, Jean Clottes, one of the most renowned figures in the study of cave paintings, pursues an answer to this “why” of Paleolithic art...