© Peter Watson 2017 resemble animal shapes. Sometimes the natural features are enhanced, becoming in effect low- relief sculpture. There are also many ‘flutings’, drawings scratched into the rock of the caves, many of which are circular, ‘c’-shaped, or drawn so as to resemble, according to many specialists, vulvas. There is no shortage of theories about the paintings, mostly proposing that the caves are religious entities of some kind, ‘shrines’ where the animals were worshipped in some form or other. I don’t disagree with this, not least because in a few places paintings have been made of what appear to be humans dressed in animal skins and even antlers – these would appear to be ‘shamans’, shamanism being generally accepted now as the earliest form of religious experience in history. Shamans, we now know, often used psycho-active drugs (hemp, opium) to ‘access’ other worlds and intervene with the animals and with the ancestors, to ensure success in the hunt. The South African scholar, David Lewis-Williams, has even argued that some of the caves are so remote and confined that their atmosphere, suitably manipulated, could have given rise to altered states of consciousness and, again, enabled a form of religious experience to be had in these remote caves. While, again, I don’t disagree with any of this, I think that a far more ‘ordinary’ (and yet practical) explanation for cave art has been overlooked. I base this view on three pieces of evidence. One is that domestic – or less threatening – animals (sheep, goats, gazelles) are never – or rarely – found in cave paintings. Second, the bones of many gazelles are sometimes found in shallow caves, where there is no cave art. And three, in cave art one of the distinctive features is that, often, the hooves of the wild animals are shown full on and in great detail. My first point, then, is this. Whatever religious role the caves performed (and I accept that they did), they also fulfilled a much more prosaic function but one central to our theme. The animals depicted in cave art are, for the most part, wild and dangerous. I argue, therefore, that many of these caves – very often narrow, winding, deep and of course very dark – were refuges, places of safety, where early humans could keep safe from wild and dangerous predators. And, while they were in the caves, hiding from wild beasts outside, they taught their young how to read the tracks of wild animals so they would know what to look out for, how to recognise danger on the savannah.