Scholars continue to dispute whether the earliest cave images functioned as ritual or shamanic imagery, hunting magic, or a more general symbolic or narrative practice, since no written record explains their purpose, and new dating techniques applied to cave sites in Europe continue to push proposed dates earlier.
What would resolve this Further advances in radiometric and uranium-series dating of mineral deposits overlying the pigment, combined with comparative anthropological study of extant hunter-gatherer ritual practice, could narrow both the dating and the interpretive question, though a definitive account of intent may never be recoverable.
OpenArchaeology and paleoanthropologyEncyclopaedia Britannica editors, Encyclopaedia Britannica