Some theories claim that cave paintings may have been a way to convey information, while other theories ascribe a religious or ceremonial purpose to them. Throughout the many different locations the paintings were found there are many common themes; suggesting the universality of intention and consistency of the emotions that may have produced the imagery. Different conjectures have been made regarding the meaning these paintings had for the people who made them.Prehistoric men may have painted animals to "catch" their soul or spirit to chase them more easily, or the paintings may represent an animistic vision and homage to the surrounding nature, or they may result from a fundamental need for expression innate to human beings, or they may be recordings of the artists' life experiences and related stories from their circle members. While the purpose of these paintings may not be fully understood, we may appreciate and enjoy their beauty, admiring the creativity of those from long ago eras.
Cave paintings are a form of Rock art, falling under the pictograph category, or applying pigments to a rock surface. Mineral pigments, most notably manganese, hematite, malachite, gypsum, limonite, clays, and other oxides, are attributed to the preservation of ancient cave paintings. The best preserved pictography is found in caves and under sheltered overhangs. Wet clay finger sketches, and charcoal drawings, are the simplest pictographs. The minerals first had to be finely ground and combined with binding materials to produce crayons or paints. Crayons and brushes of animal hair were digged with paintings in caves.Extremely fine lines prove excellent brushes are made. The human hand, the most common rock art element found all over the world, exemplifies several types of pictography. A technique that has been used since the Neolithic is spraying around a hand which results in a negative image. The more common positive printing was often done with hand applied pigment and transferred to the rock.
Since the phenomena began to be studied, what rock art means and why the ancients practiced it has been a bane of contention among scholars. Some have argued that such images are records of hunts that not only served to inventory the number of animals killed, but also future references for patterns of animal migration. Henri Breuil interpreted rock paintings as hunting magic, which meant that the number of animals killed by hunting parties increased.An alternative hypothesis developed by David Lewis-Williams, and loosely based on ethnographic observations of contemporary hunter-gatherer cultures, is that Cro-Magnon shamans made the drawings. The shaman would disappear into the darkness of the caves, enter a trance state and then paint pictures of their dreams, perhaps with some notion of pulling power out of the walls of the cave itself. This explains the remoteness of some of the paintings (often in deep or small caves) and the variety of subjects (from prey animals to predators and human hand-prints).
R. Dale Guthrie has not only studied the most artistic and celebrated paintings but also a number of art and figurines of lower quality and he recognizes a wide range of skills and ages among the artists. He also points out that the key themes in the paintings and other objects (powerful beasts, dangerous hunting scenes, and the over-sex portrayal of women in the Venus figurines) are to be anticipated in the dreams of adolescent males, who constituted a large part of the human population at the time. In her book When God Was a Woman, however, Merlin Stone suggested that many scholars and archaeologists are imposing modern sexist views on ancient findings.Given the prevalence of worship of Goddess (beginning between 7,000 and 25,000 B.C.E.), it is probable that art portraying the fullness of a woman's body was not the imagination of a adolescent male but reproductions created by artists of either sex in honor of women. As with all prehistory, it is difficult to be certain because of the relative lack of documentary evidence and the other pitfalls associated with it.
Graham Hancock's Supernatural: Meetings with Mankind's Ancient Teachers explore the different theories about rock art interpretation, and provide extensive references. He concludes that the most credible appears to be recent theory that links shamanic and religious practices with cave painting worldwide.