Did art peak 30,000 years ago? How cave paintings became my lockdown obsession

Portraiture, perspective, impressionism, movement, mythology: cave artists could do the lot. And I have spent the past year on a virtual odyssey of their primordial wondersI was recently awoken in the night by lions, their eyes glaring in the dark from blunt rectangular faces as they stalked bison through an ancient, arid grassland. As I came to, however, I realised I was not about to be eaten alive. This was simply one of the perils of spending too much time looking at images of cave art on the