discovery of rock art occurred in 1908, when some missionaries on the western shore of Lake Nyanza in Tanzania found red figures in rock shelters. The first decorated cave in the Central African Republic was found in 1912, and engravings were discovered in Cameroon in 1933. In North Africa, rock paintings (as opposed to engravings) were not documented until 1933 when a camel-corps officer, one Lieutenant Brenans, ventured into a deep canyon of the Tassili n’Ajjer during a police operation; as he rode slowly on his camel, he saw strange figures on the cliffs of the wadi: the animal and human engravings of Oued Djerat. He also saw very delicate paintings, the first European to do so. New discoveries continue to be made in Africa; for example, the first rock art (in this case, engravings) in Gabon was found only in 1987.

Concerning Ice Age art, the huge majority of discoveries were made in the twentieth century, not only of caves (an average of one per year, including such major sites as Niaux, Les Trois Frères, Pech Merle, lascaux, and Chauvet) but also of thousands of pieces of portable art. In recent decades, it has become apparent that art of the same age also exists outside Europe, indeed, on every other continent. The subject was dominated by abbé henri breuil until his death in 1961; renowned for his tracings of cave and portable art (primarily in Europe but also in southern Africa), he was less noted for his interpretations, which remained firmly entrenched in simplistic notions of hunting and fertility magic based on selected ethnographic analogies.

Breuil was one of the towering figures in Old World prehistory during the first half of the twentieth century. He trained as a priest in his youth but was allowed to devote all his energies to prehistory: he undertook virtually no religious duties and made almost no contribution to the reconciliation of prehistory’s findings with religious teachings. He had the supreme good fortune, as a young man with a talent for drawing animals, to make the acquaintance of Piette and emile cartailhac, two of France’s greatest prehistorians at the turn of the twentieth century, when they needed help with the study and illustration of Paleolithic portable art and cave art, respectively. Breuil consequently became the world’s leading authority on Paleolithic art. He discovered many decorated caves or galleries himself and copied their art—by his own reckoning, he spent about 700 days of his life underground. Although now seen as excessively subjective and incomplete, his tracings are nevertheless recognized as remarkable for their time. In some instances, they constitute our only record of cave figures that have since faded or disappeared.

Breuil’s concept of two phases in the development of Paleolithic art (two essentially similar but independent consecutive cycles, each progressing from simple to complex forms in engraving, sculpture, and painting) was inconsistent and unsatisfactory and was eventually replaced by andré leroi-gourhan’s four “styles,” themselves now being abandoned. Breuil thought of Paleolithic art primarily in terms of hunting magic, thanks to a simplistic use of selected ethnographic analogies, and he generally considered decorated caves to be accumulations of single figures, unlike Leroi-Gourhan who saw them as as carefully planned compositions.

Breuil’s legacy of publications and tracings has been found to contain many errors and misjudgments, but his work also contains an abundance of profound insights that are only now being supported by new finds; for example, new direct dates and pigment analyses in European caves often tend to support Breuil’s views rather than André Leroi-Gourhan’s.

After Breuil’s death, the field was dominated by Leroi-Gourhan, who undertook no tracing but revolutionized interpretation by rejecting ethnography and conducting a structuralist analysis of the content of cave art. He found a basic dualism—i.e., the art was dominated by horses and bison—which he interpreted as male and female symbols, respectively, and he also saw the art’s nonfigurative “signs” in sexual terms. He believed that caves were not simple collections of individual images (as Breuil had thought) but carefully planned homogeneous compositions laid out according to a preconceived blueprint. Since Leroi-Gourhan’s death in 1986, approaches to this subject have splintered, and it has become apparent that no single