One of the limitations we’re dealing with is that there’s incomplete data. We’ve got cave art, since it was sheltered and survived tens of thousands of years. We don’t have any other painted art they may have had on exposed cliff sides, rocks and trees, themselves and the objects they carried with them, and so on, so we don’t know how cave art relates to any other genre of prehistoric art. It’s generally believed, though, that cave painting were special in some way, even if we don’t know exactly what that way is. Caves were difficult to reach and required that the painter bring light with him, all of which meant that painting caves was a bit of an ordeal. So what were those paintings for? Early scholars came up with fairly simple ideas about sympathetic magic. They’re painting, say, aurochs so they can summon it or capture its spirit or something and therefore hunt it successfully. That’s certainly possible, but later scholars saw that as likely an oversimplification. People create art for many reasons. It’s not like Monet, for example, painted so that he could successfully hunt water lilies. So they tried to get a little deeper into the art to try to figure out what it might all mean. One scholar, looking particularly at Lascaux, thought that the paintings there might be some sort of statement marking sections of the cave complex with gendered signs. There are, for example, far more round symbols in large chambers than in narrow corridors, and more lines and angled symbols in corridors than chambers. The paintings at Lascaux, it is suggested, are saying something about sex. It is far from clear what they might be saying, of course, but that’s the kind of thing that might be inaccessible to us. Even that interpretation, though, has fallen out of favor as being rather reductionist, but it did go beyond simplistic first guesses. Interpretations these days tend to be rather varied and subtle. Some paintings have a communal element to them, with multiple handprints on them or similar groups of markings. Some may have been art for art’s sake, making paintings of animals because that’s what the painter thought was important. Some may have had a deeper religious purpose, making paintings because there was something spiritually significant about the animals which had nothing to do with hunting and killing them. And some, yes, may have had something to do with magic. In short, we don’t really know, but we’re thinking of a great many possibilities.