Painted in The Dark: World's First Galleries

Fifty thousand years ago someone crawled into the dark with a burning lamp and painted a pig on a limestone wall. This book is the tour. Chauvet's lions and Lascaux's bulls, the Sulawesi narrative panels, the Rainbow Serpent, the San trance dancers, the canyon ghosts of Utah. Five continents of the world's first galleries, with the science that dates them, the theories that try to explain them, and the honest fights over both. More than 130 photographs, all public domain or Creative Commons, attributed in full with photographer, licence and source. Museum replicas are labelled as replicas. Dates are hedged where the evidence is contested, because the disputes are part of the subject. Includes a master timeline of key sites, a bibliography, a regional index of every site and every page, and a complete image credits appendix. Foreword by tijo. The body text was compiled and edited at tijo.art with research assistance.