Paleolithic
people living more than 10,000 years ago had a better artistic eye than modern
painters and sculptures — at least when it came to watching how horses and
other four-legged animals move.
A
new analysis of 1,000 pieces of prehistoric and modern artwork finds that
"cavemen," or people living during the upper Paleolithic period
between 10,000 and 50,000 years ago, were more accurate in their depictions of
four-legged animals walking than artists are today. While modern artists
portray these animals walking incorrectly 57.9 percent of the time, prehistoric
cave painters only made mistakes 46.2 percent of the time.
Modern
artists are also worse at capturing the gait of horses and other quadrupeds
than taxidermists, anatomy textbook writers and toy figurine designers, the
researchers report today (Dec. 5) in the open-access journal PLOS
ONE.
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