Drawing How the Brain Represents Animals

I have a large print of the image at the right hanging on my wall. The images are from the
Chauvet Cave France and were made in the Aurignacian Era around 40,000 years ago.

The enlarged version shows more of the detail of the animal drawings than this JPG does. The animals are drawn with charcoal and are actually really good sketches that are shaded and the lines are emphasized in the same way contemporary artists draw realistic 2D projections of the 3D world.

A realistic sketch is probably a lesson in how our brain represents the natural world--animals in particular. The drawings made on the cave wall in charcoal emphasize boundaries and the most information dense (in the information theory sense) portions of the visual image. The thing an artist actually draws with a pencil is how their brain represents the world visually.

Information Density of Two Lions Image

The interesting thing to me is that the external world is actually in our brains. The minute differences in proportion of various animal heads, for example, is encoded there so we can recognize different species--some now extinct--of bears and lions in the cave painting. Our ancestors spent countless generations with them.