Cave painting

Lascaux (English: /læˈskoʊ/ la-SKOH, US also /lɑːˈskoʊ/ lah-SKOH; French: Grotte de Lascaux French pronunciation: [ɡʁɔt də lasko], "Lascaux Cave") is a network of caves near the village of Montignac, in the department of Dordogne in southwestern France. Over 600 parietal wall paintings cover the interior walls and ceilings of the cave. The paintings represent primarily large animals, typical local contemporary fauna that correspond with the fossil record of the Upper Paleolithic in the area. They are the combined effort of many generations. With continued debate, the age of the paintings is now usually estimated at 17,000 to 22,000 years (early Magdalenian). Because of the outstanding prehistoric art in the cave, Lascaux was inducted into the UNESCO World Heritage List in 1979, as an element of the Prehistoric Sites and Decorated Caves of the Vézère Valley.

The original caves have been closed to the public since 1963, as their condition was quickly deteriorating, but there are now a number of replicas.

Maps have been one of the most important human inventions, allowing humans to explain and navigate their way. When and how the earliest maps were made is unclear, but maps of local terrain are believed to have been independently invented by many cultures. The earliest putative maps include cave paintings and etchings on tusk and stone. Maps were produced extensively by ancient Babylon, Greece, Rome, China, and India.

The earliest maps ignored the curvature of Earth's surface, both because the shape of the Earth was unknown and because the curvature is not important across the small areas being mapped. However, since the age of Classical Greece, maps of large regions, and especially of the world, have used projection from a model globe to control how the inevitable distortion gets apportioned on the map.

Purported remains of Paleolithic dogs have been reported from several European archaeological sites dating to over 30,000 years ago. Their status as domesticated is highly controversial, with some authors suggesting them to be the ancestors of the domestic dog or an extinct, morphologically and genetically divergent wolf population.

Cueva de las Manos (Spanish for Cave of the Hands or Cave of Hands) is a cave and complex of rock art sites in the province of Santa Cruz, Argentina, 163 km (101 mi) south of the town of Perito Moreno. It is named for the hundreds of paintings of hands stenciled, in multiple collages, on the rock walls. The art was created in several waves between 7,300 BC and 700 AD, during the Archaic period of pre-Columbian South America. The age of the paintings was calculated from the remains of bone pipes used for spraying the paint on the wall of the cave to create the artwork, radiocarbon dating of the artwork, and stratigraphic dating.

The site is considered by some scholars to be the best material evidence of early South American hunter-gatherer groups. Argentine surveyor and archaeologist Carlos J. Gradin and his team conducted the most important research on the site in 1964, when they began excavating sites during a 30-year study of cave art in and around Cueva de las Manos. The site is a National Historic Monument in Argentina and a UNESCO World Heritage Site.

In archaeology, rock art refers to human-made markings placed on natural surfaces, typically vertical stone surfaces. A high proportion of surviving historic and prehistoric rock art is found in caves or partly enclosed rock shelters; this type also may be called cave art or parietal art. A global phenomenon, rock art is found in many culturally diverse regions of the world. It has been produced in many contexts throughout human history. In terms of technique, the four main groups are:

• cave paintings,
• petroglyphs, which are carved or scratched into the rock surface,
• sculpted rock reliefs, and
• geoglyphs, which are formed on the ground.

The oldest known rock art dates from the Upper Palaeolithic period, having been found in Europe, Australia, Asia, and Africa. Anthropologists studying these artworks believe that they likely had magico-religious significance.

Visualization (or visualisation), also known as graphics visualization, is any technique for creating images, diagrams, or animations to communicate a message. Visualization through visual imagery has been an effective way to communicate both abstract and concrete ideas since the dawn of humanity. Examples from history include cave paintings, Egyptian hieroglyphs, Greek geometry, and Leonardo da Vinci's revolutionary methods of technical drawing for engineering purposes that actively involve scientific requirements.

Visualization today has ever-expanding applications in science, education, engineering (e.g., product visualization), interactive multimedia, medicine, etc. Typical of a visualization application is the field of computer graphics. The invention of computer graphics (and 3D computer graphics) may be the most important development in visualization since the invention of central perspective in the Renaissance period. The development of animation also helped advance visualization.

The woolly mammoth (Mammuthus primigenius) is an extinct species of mammoth that lived from the Middle Pleistocene until its extinction in the Holocene epoch. It was one of the last in a line of mammoth species, beginning with the African Mammuthus subplanifrons in the early Pliocene. The woolly mammoth began to diverge from the steppe mammoth about 800,000 years ago in Siberia. Its closest extant relative is the Asian elephant. The Columbian mammoth (Mammuthus columbi) lived alongside the woolly mammoth in North America, and DNA studies show that the two hybridised with each other. Mammoth remains were long known in Asia before they became known to Europeans. The origin of these remains was long debated and often explained as the remains of legendary creatures. The mammoth was identified as an extinct elephant species by Georges Cuvier in 1796.

The appearance and behaviour of the woolly mammoth are among the best studied of any prehistoric animal because of the discovery of frozen carcasses in Siberia and North America, as well as skeletons, teeth, stomach contents, dung, and depiction from life in prehistoric cave paintings. It was roughly the same size as modern African elephants. Males reached shoulder heights between 2.67 and 3.49 m (8 ft 9 in and 11 ft 5 in) and weighed between 3.9 and 8.2 t (3.8 and 8.1 long tons; 4.3 and 9.0 short tons). Females reached 2.3–2.6 m (7 ft 7 in – 8 ft 6 in) in shoulder heights and weighed between 2.8–4 t (2.8–3.9 long tons; 3.1–4.4 short tons). A newborn calf weighed about 90 kg (200 lb). The woolly mammoth was well adapted to the cold environments present during glacial periods, including the last ice age. It was covered in fur, with an outer covering of long guard hairs and a shorter undercoat. The colour of the coat varied from dark to light. The ears and tail were short to minimise frostbite and heat loss. It had long, curved tusks and four molars, which were replaced six times during the lifetime of an individual. Its behaviour was similar to that of modern elephants, and it used its tusks and trunk for manipulating objects, fighting, and foraging. The diet of the woolly mammoth was mainly grasses and sedges. Individuals could probably reach the age of 60. Its habitat was the mammoth steppe, which stretched across northern Eurasia and North America.

Pornography (colloquially called porn or porno) is sexually suggestive material, such as a picture, video, text, or audio, intended for sexual arousal. Made for consumption by adults, pornographic depictions have evolved from cave paintings, some forty millennia ago, to modern-day virtual reality presentations. A general distinction of adults-only sexual content is made, classifying it as pornography or erotica.

The oldest artifacts considered pornographic were discovered in Germany in 2008 and are dated to be at least 35,000 years old. Human enchantment with sexual imagery representations has been a constant throughout history. However, the reception of such imagery varied according to the historical, cultural, and national contexts. The Indian Sanskrit text Kama Sutra (3rd century CE) contained prose, poetry, and illustrations regarding sexual behavior, and the book was celebrated; while the British English text Fanny Hill (1748), considered "the first original English prose pornography," has been one of the most prosecuted and banned books. In the late 19th century, a film by Thomas Edison that depicted a kiss was denounced as obscene in the United States, whereas Eugène Pirou's 1896 film Bedtime for the Bride was received very favorably in France. Starting from the mid-twentieth century on, societal attitudes towards sexuality became lenient in the Western world where legal definitions of obscenity were made limited. In 1969, Blue Movie by Andy Warhol became the first film to depict unsimulated sex that received a wide theatrical release in the United States. This was followed by the "Golden Age of Porn" (1969–1984). The introduction of home video and the World Wide Web in the late 20th century led to global growth in the pornography business. Beginning in the 21st century, greater access to the Internet and affordable smartphones made pornography more mainstream.

The art of Europe, also known as Western art, encompasses the history of visual art in Europe. European prehistoric art started as mobile Upper Paleolithic rock and cave painting and petroglyph art and was characteristic of the period between the Paleolithic and the Iron Age. Written histories of European art often begin with the Aegean civilizations, dating from the 3rd millennium BC. However a consistent pattern of artistic development within Europe becomes clear only with Ancient Greek art, which was adopted and transformed by Rome and, with the Roman Empire, was carried across much of Europe, North Africa and Western Asia.

The influence of the art of the Classical period waxed and waned throughout the next two thousand years, seeming to slip into a distant memory in parts of the Medieval period, to re-emerge in the Renaissance, suffer a period of what some early art historians viewed as "decay" during the Baroque period, to reappear in a refined form in Neo-Classicism and to be reborn in Post-Modernism.