Cave paintings of horses actually look like Paleolithic horses

By Eliza

As horse lovers, we know that there is something timeless about the appeal of the horse. Horses possess beauty, strength, power. . .all things to which people are naturally attracted. When I want a timeless image, I reach for the HipstaPrint app on my phone's camera (see image to left.) According to an article in in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), the pull to appreciate and depict nearby horses has been around a very long time. Through DNA typing and laborious research, scientists found that the horses that were around when the famous cave paintings of Pech-Merle, France, which date back 25,000 years, actually looked like those paintings. (One of many interesting facts in the piece: one of the colors was a "leopard" pattern.) This shows that pretty much all of the colors shown in cave paintings have been found in prehistoric horses. The cavemen were not only artists, but naturalists capturing the world--and the horses--they knew.

Abstract and story are here.