Video: The Earliest Animation Of All Time, As Created In Cave Paintings

Marc Azéma, a film maker and researcher at the University of Toulouse Le Mirail, believes that cave paintings contain mankind’s earliest attempts at multi-frame, animation-style motion.

He’s taken some images from the caves in Lascaux and sequenced them appropriately, and the effect is actually pretty convincing. Here’s a brief demonstration as posted today by The New Scientist.

But Azema isn’t just presenting his findings now. These clips are actually excerpted from a longer video posted almost two years ago – possibly longer, in the first case. That’s below, as well as another clip from the same youtube account. That one shows a slightly more recent attempt to animate.

Azéma’s book on prehistoric proto-cinema sadly seems to be out of print. To the local lending library I go…