Art Throughout the Ages: Stone Age (30,000 BC - 2500 BC)

So recently I've been really into ART. And when I mean "into it", I mean that I would like to do some and learn about it, not like actually knowing things about it (lol). But I thought this would be a good place to start - learning about all the different types Art throughout the ages, like I've always heard about Impressionist paintings or whatever, but I don't actually know what it is! Okay so, here goes (disclaimer: this compilation may be quite lame and inaccurate):

Stone Age

This was the era of cave paintings. The most common subjects were large animals, in particular, bisons, horses, aurochs and deer. Drawing detailed portraits of humans was "religious taboo" and probably meant that the person would die or something (just my own guesses here). The paintings were rendered by mineral pigments which were usually red, yellow or black in the form of ochre, hematite, manganese oxide and charcoal. The paintings have been suggested to be "hunting magic" meant to increase the number of animals by Henri Breuil. Another theory is by David Lewis-Williams to suggest that the paintings were the visions of shamans.
Apparently according to R. Dale Guthrie, since the main themes are of large beasts and also some Venus type figurines, the paintings were usually made by adolescent males (especially cos they made most of the population at that time) though some spotted horses could have been created by females (some vague sexism implied here but I'll leave it cos it's probably true which leads me to think is gender really a social construct? but I digress).
Some famous examples of cave paintings are in the Lascaux Cave in Southwestern France.

The caves at Maros in Sulawesi, Indonesia are famous for their handprints and they date back to 40,000 years ago making them the oldest examples of cave art.

The Venus/Woman of Willendorf is dated back to 28000 to 25000 BC near Willendorf in Lower Austria. If you want, you could go see it in the Natural History Museum of Vienna. It was made in Paleolithic times and there's so many confusing different terms but basically people hung out in groups and scavenged food and used rocks to make stuff. There are many such female figures out there similar to this one and researchers suggest they may be "fertility godesses" (and just to make clear they pre-date Venus the Greek goddess).

So that's about it for the Stone Age, I mean sure there's loads more you could learn about, but that would make this blog post HUGE and I'm sure you could read some great books that would actually be useful instead of wasting time reading random stuff I got from the interweb so this may be a good link http://www.fodors.com/community/europe/ger-asks-best-book-to-explore-prehistoric-cave-art.cfm 

I was going to put every period of Art into this blog post but now I've realised that that is really impractical and would make reading this and making this quite laborious. So, till next time chums!