Did Prehistoric Toddlers Make Cave Art?

One of the most commonly depicted images in prehistoric cave art is the human hand. Tens of thousands of years ago, humans created these images by blowing pigment onto their hands to create a negative outline or stencil on a cave wall. Sometimes, they’d press a pigment-covered hand onto the surface of caves to create a positive print. We don’t know what meaning prehistoric humans drew from this practice, but we do know that children were a part of it.

In a 2022 study of Upper Paleolithic cave art, researchers determined that up to 25 percent of hand stencils in five Spanish caves depicted child-sized hands. The study, published in the Journal of Archaeological Science, reported that some of the hands were so small that they may have belonged to infants. Researchers estimate that adult and child Homo sapiens created these hand decorations some 18,000 to 20,000 years ago.

Going into caves to create art could be dangerous for prehistoric adults, who relied solely on fire to navigate the darkness and challenging terrain. The presence of children suggests they were an important part of this practice, and that they may have been involved in creating other types of art as well.

Prehistoric cave art has been found all over the world, but much of the research has focused on caves in Spain and France. One of the clearest indications of prehistoric children’s presence in these caves is the kid-sized footprints they left in soft soil that fossilized over time, says Ran Barkai, an archaeology professor at Tel Aviv University and coauthor of a 2025 Arts paper about Upper Paleolithic children in decorated caves.

Archaeologists have also found children’s fossilized handprints in caves, as well as “finger flutings”—designs made with fingers on soft surfaces that fossilized over time—that could have been made by child-sized fingers. Other archaeologists have disputed the ability of researchers to determine an artist’s age based on the size of finger flutings. However, painted hand stencils offer more concrete evidence of children’s participation in cave art.

Prehistoric people made hand stencils by holding their hands up to a cave wall and blowing ochre, charcoal or other colorant material onto their hand through a hollow bone or reed. This created a negative hand stencil slightly larger than the actual hand, just as a positive print made with a paint-covered hand would be a little smaller than the hand that made it. Among all the known examples of prehistoric hand art in European caves, stencil outlines make up the vast majority of images.

For the 2022 Journal of Archaeological Science study, lead author Verónica Fernández-Navarro and her colleagues studied over 200 hand stencils in five Spanish caves: Fuente del Salín, El Castillo, La Garma, Fuente del Trucho and Maltravieso. They were surprised to find that up to a quarter of the hand stencils appeared small enough to belong to children, with some so small they estimated the outlines depicted the hands of infants younger than two years old.

Fernández-Navarro points out that because infants could not have made these stencils by themselves, older children or adults must have helped them. The method of blowing pigment can be difficult to master, as Fernández-Navarro says her colleagues discovered when they made stencils of their own hands as part of their study. The fact that young children would have needed assistance is significant because it provides evidence of teaching and learning in the archaeological record.

Most of the hand stencils that Fernández-Navarro and her colleagues studied are located closer to the entrances of caves, but archaeological evidence suggests that prehistoric children ventured deeper into caves and may have created art there as well.

Archaeologists have discovered child-sized footprints and heel prints fossilized deep in the recesses of France’s Tuc d’Audoubert cave, which is famous for a 15,000-year-old clay sculpture depicting bison. Even if children did not contribute to the sculpture, the footprints indicate that the deeper parts of caves—which may have contained different types of art than the entrances—were places explored by both children and adults.

Archeologists and child development experts argued in Hunter Gatherer Research that children living 14,000 years ago created charcoal drawings in Spain’s Las Monedas cave, and that these drawings are distinguishable from pictures that adults (or older adolescents) drew in the same cave. The paper touches on the question of how to distinguish a prehistoric child’s work from that of an adult novice.

In the case of Las Monedas, researchers argued that the children’s drawings were located in a different part of the cave than the more polished-looking “adult” drawings. The children’s drawings were also much closer to the ground, around where a toddler could reach. In addition, the researchers concluded that the children’s art displayed some of the same patterns seen in modern children’s drawings as they develop their motor skills.

Later, another team of researchers set out to distinguish novice art created by prehistoric adults from works that children might have made. Their 2024 paper in PLOS One argued that child-sized scratch marks and fingerprints on 30,000-year-old clay figurines in the Czech Republic provided clues as to who the artist was. They theorized that these figurines are a prehistoric example of learning through play, and a sign of how Paleolithic children interacted with their environment.