French Archaeologist Believes European Cave Art Is The Earliest Form of Animation

Dan Colman | Life in a cultural petri dish | June 18, 2012

French archaeologist and filmmaker Marc Azéma has a pretty mad theory about the earliest cave paintings created some 30,000 years ago at sites like Chauvet. He believes they weren’t static creations, rather that they were meant to show movement, to tell a sequential story.

Yes, that’s right, Azéma thinks the cave paintings in France and Spain gave us our first animations, a prehistoric kind of cinema. In the video above Azéma takes cave paintings from Lascaux, Les Trois-Frères, Chauvet and elsewhere and shows how the images, if arranged sequentially, actually depict motion. The audio report below tells you more about Azéma’s research.

So do you think its possible?

Via Open Culture