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

[Brendon Connelly]

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 byThe 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.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UM7gRh41pBA[/youtube]

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gDqgrjG1Tv4[/youtube]

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

[Blackfist]

[Death's Head]

I was reading about this in the last issue of New Scientist. Coincidentally, I was reading Scott McCloud's Understanding Comics the other day and in the beginning he posits cave paintings as an early form of sequential art with words, ie. comics.