That Magdalenian art is not a random jumble of animal figures but a specially ordered structure is, on the whole, not a new idea

That Magdalenian art is not a random jumble of animal figures but a specially ordered structure is, on the whole, not a new idea. André Leroi-Gourhan wrote about it in the 1960s. He arranged the Stone Age herd around the horse and the bison. The scheme was discussed from time to time, but remained hypothetical.

And now, some 60 years later, Iñaki Intxaurbe of the University of the Basque Country has analysed the images (not all of them, of course, but only those from nine Basque caves), and a statistical model has shown that a hierarchy really does exist between the figures, in which bison, horses and ibex stand at the centre of the compositions, while the other animals are arranged around them. The horses, for the most part, face right, while the other beasts, as a rule, face left.