<P> Other examples may date as late as the Early Bronze Age, but the well - known Magdalenian style seen at Lascaux in France (c . 15,000 BCE) and Altamira in Spain died out about 10,000 BCE, coinciding with the advent of the Neolithic period . Some caves probably continued to be painted over a period of several thousands of years . </P> <P> The next phase of surviving European prehistoric painting, the rock art of the Iberian Mediterranean Basin, was very different, concentrating on large assemblies of smaller and much less detailed figures, with at least as many humans as animals . This was created roughly between 10,000 and 5,500 years ago, and painted in rock shelters under cliffs or shallow caves, in contrast to the recesses of deep caves used in the earlier (and much colder) period . Though individual figures are less naturalistic, they are grouped in coherent grouped compositions to a much greater degree . </P> <P> The most common subjects in cave paintings are large wild animals, such as bison, horses, aurochs, and deer, and tracings of human hands as well as abstract patterns, called finger flutings . The species found most often were suitable for hunting by humans, but were not necessarily the actual typical prey found in associated deposits of bones; for example, the painters of Lascaux have mainly left reindeer bones, but this species does not appear at all in the cave paintings, where equine species are the most common . Drawings of humans were rare and are usually schematic as opposed to the more detailed and naturalistic images of animal subjects . One explanation for this may be that realistically painting the human form was "forbidden by a powerful religious taboo ." Kieran D. O'Hara, geologist, suggests in his book Cave Art and Climate Change that climate controlled the themes depicted . Pigments used include red and yellow ochre, hematite, manganese oxide and charcoal . Sometimes the silhouette of the animal was incised in the rock first, and in some caves all or many of the images are only engraved in this fashion, taking them somewhat out of a strict definition of "cave painting". </P> <P> Similarly, large animals are also the most common subjects in the many small carved and engraved bone or ivory (less often stone) pieces dating from the same periods . But these include the group of Venus figurines, which have no real equivalent in cave paintings . </P>

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