Who Started Drawing First

Sometime in the Stone Age, human artists began experimenting with a new form of visual art: drawing. Now, from the ancient rubble that accumulated on the floor of a South African cave comes the earliest-known example — an abstract, crayon-on-stone piece created about 73,000 years ago.

Who was the first artist?

More than 65,000 years ago, a Neanderthal reached out and made strokes in red ochre on the wall of a cave, and in doing so, became the first known artist on Earth, scientists claim. The discovery overturns the widely-held belief that modern humans are the only species to have expressed themselves through works of art.

When did humans first start to draw?

It’s widely accepted that early humans made figurative art—that is, drawings of real objects like people or animals—around 40,000 years ago, around the same time as a major migration from Africa to Europe, where many of these early figurative drawings have been found.