26 hours in darkness

An unknown number on the phone—never a good sign. But this time, an engaged female voice managed to override my well-trained skepticism. It didn’t take her many words to reveal a more-than-average fascination for the dark spaces beyond day and time. It was Mia Habib on the line, and the conversation was about caves. She had just visited Solsem Cave and other caves on the Helgeland coast—sites I also knew well through my work as an archaeologist. It quickly became clear that we shared a deep interest in caves and cave paintings, though Mia’s motivation differed from that of most archaeologists. She wanted to subject herself to the cave—to feel the still, cool darkness that embraced the painted figures within—and she intended to stay inside the cave, alone, for several days.

To me, the plan sounded like a descent into both physical and psychological endurance. When she asked for a meeting after her stay, I didn’t hesitate to open my calendar. I very much wanted to hear more—from her passion to her experiences in the cave’s darkness—and felt at the same time that my own reflections on caves and cave paintings might be worth sharing.

I heard nothing more until the scheduled day, when Mia and Natanya Kjølås arrived at my office at the Museum of Natural History and Archaeology. By then, Mia had “done a full day and night” inside Haugshula (also known as Svarthullet—“the Black Hole”), near Solsemhula, where Norway’s first prehistoric cave paintings were discovered in 1912.[1] Haugshula itself contains no ancient paintings, but finds indicate that people stayed there in the early Iron Age.[2] 

Natanya had been there as a safety companion, camping in a tent just outside the cave entrance while Mia lay alone in the darkness within. Mia had noted that Natanya often sensed potential problems well before they arose—an ability that might come in handy during isolation underground. It almost sounded like a story from One Thousand and One Nights: Natanya had devised a small pulley system with a cord they could tug between them as a sign of life—a knot on the line would signal trouble. That small reassurance might indeed be needed in the eternal night, where comfort was scarce: a sleeping mat on stone, only the bare essentials of food and water, no phone, no watch to measure the long hours. No light, save a single tealight in reserve. No music in the ears, and little to see—only faint gradations of sound and shade, no visible difference between eyes open to the world or closed to the inner.

Mia wanted to feel the darkness and intended to use only the red emergency light if absolutely necessary. She explained:
- I chose to be in the cave during the Jewish holiday Yom Kippur, when one is meant to pause, turn inward, and fast for 25 hours. Instead of fasting, I stayed in the darkness of the cave.

There was never any knot on the line between Mia and Natanya—but there were long, uneasy hours. Inside the cave, the flood of everyday sensory impressions was gone. Here there was ample opportunity to “pause, turn inward, and fast.” The cold crept in, small sounds grew large, and the water trickling in from the cave mouth after the rain outside sounded like a roaring waterfall. She had to light the tealight briefly to calm a bout of claustrophobia. After 26 hours, she felt an overwhelming need to stop. Above all, she dreaded facing another long night in the dripping darkness, even though it was technically just as dark outside—and even though she could no longer be sure how long she had truly been outside time.

In any case, I was deeply impressed. It may not have been as long as she had planned, but I’ve spent enough time in caves to think that even six hours would have been plenty. Mia had endured twenty more—twenty-six hours, over a full day, with only the lights of her own mind for company.

Mia may have carried the seed of the idea when she entered the cave, but I suspect Psychedelic Cave took form in that darkness, perhaps somewhere between the twenty-fifth and twenty-sixth hour. In any case, it was fascinating to hear that Mia’s experiences inside the cave resonated strongly with many of my own.[3] More on that later.

Travel Routes

During the preparations for Psychedelic Cave, a number of caves and grottos were visited—some containing prehistoric paintings, others vast natural limestone caverns in Norway and abroad. These excursions included both genuine caves and large replicas of famous karst caves (stalactite caverns) decorated with Ice Age paintings. The following visits were undertaken:

2023:
Solsem Cave, Leka, Nordland, Norway – cave with paintings (stick figures) and Bronze Age cultural layers.

Haugshula, also on Leka (near Solsem Cave), where Mia’s long cave stay took place; traces of early Iron Age occupation.

Skåren–Monsen Cave, Brønnøy, Nordland – large cave with painted animal figures.

Torghatten, Brønnøy, Nordland – large sea cave/tunnel that cuts straight through the mountain; heavily eroded walls, no paintings.
Participants: Mia Habib and Natanya Kjølås.

2024:
Chauvet 2, Ardèche, southern France – replica of the Chauvet Cave and museum at Pont d’Arc, home to some of the most spectacular and oldest Ice Age paintings, 36,000 years old.

Aven d’Orgnac, Ardèche, southern France – original karst cave (no paintings) with enormous stalactite formations, one of the largest and reportedly deepest caves in France (121 meters).

Lascaux II and IV, Dordogne, southern France – two generations of replicas of the legendary Lascaux Cave, perhaps the most famous of all, with grand paintings from 22,000–17,000 years ago.

El Castillo and Las Monedas, Cantabria, northern Spain – two original limestone caves with paintings and Ice Age habitation layers. Layers near the entrance of El Castillo date back 120,000 years (Neanderthals) and later modern humans, who also left paintings deeper inside. These are among the oldest known in Europe—up to 40,000 years old.

Altamira, Cantabria, northern Spain – replica cave with paintings and habitation traces from 17,000–11,000 years ago, renowned for its reclining bison paintings.

Grotte de Niaux, Ariège, southern France – deep karst cave (14 km) with original paintings from 17,000–11,000 years ago.

Clamouse, Hérault, southern France – large show cave, a natural wonder with impressive stalactite formations, but no paintings.
Participants: Mia Habib, Natanya Kjølås, Laura Spottag Fog, and Hein B. Bjerck.

2025:
Kollhellaren, Moskenes, Lofoten, Norway – large sea cave on the outer side of Lofotodden, containing cave paintings (stick-figure humans) from the Bronze Age (around 3,000–2,000 years old).

Fumane, Italy – cave with traces of human habitation, first by Neanderthals and later by Aurignacian (modern) humans, who left behind cave paintings. In Fumane, several painted stones have been found, among them one bearing a shaman-like figure known as “The Fumane Shaman.”

Onferno and Re Tiberio, Italy – unlike the other caves visited, these grottos teemed with life, with bats swarming under the ceilings. Re Tiberio has at various times been used for rituals and as a burial site. Both caves also served as hiding places during World War II.
Participants: Mia Habib, Natanya Kjølås, Laura Spottag Fog, Anja Müller, Nina Wollny, Giulia Vismara, Ingeborg Olerud. 

Together, these excursions gave a vivid impression of the nature and diversity of subterranean formations—what caves are. But in this context, it was perhaps even more intriguing to explore the experience of these places—what caves do when encountered by humans, both here and now (as in Mia’s meeting with Haugshula), and in deep time.

The relevance of examining the experience—of studying “what caves do”—draws on phenomenology: studying things as they are perceived and experienced through our being in the world. Physically speaking, there is little to separate us modern humans from those who ventured into caves in deep time. We are roughly the same size, have the same body temperature, and share the same sensory organs—sight, hearing, smell, touch—and the same basic needs. One might therefore think that the experience of underground spaces is universal and timeless.

Yet phenomenology is often criticized for paying too little heed to prejudice, preference, experience, culture, and worldview—all of which shape how sensory impressions are formed and processed. Still, it is not without value to study the world through our own bodies and senses, whatever modern cultural baggage we carry. This embodied exploration lies at the core of Psychedelic Cave.

Caves: The Rooms at the Bottom of the World

All over the world, caves tend to share certain qualities. They are enclosed, dark, and difficult to enter; they lead inward and downward, away from daylight and the known world. They can easily evoke both fear and fascination, and for good reason.

On the one hand, the cave is a natural fortress—a safe, protective womb that holds warmth and shelter from the cold. On the other hand, it is home to cold air, dripping water, echoes, and creatures that thrive in darkness—bats, insects, reptiles. The further one ventures inside, the more the ordinary world disappears. Sunlight fades. Temperature and sound change. Direction loses meaning.

Even for a modern visitor with headlamp and helmet, the transition from light to darkness is palpable. Every sense sharpens. One’s body becomes alert to the smallest shift in air or footing. To ancient humans, without artificial light, such transitions must have been profound, both physically and symbolically.

The cave entrance marks a threshold—a liminal zone between worlds. To pass that line is to enter a space unlike any other. In many cultures, caves have been understood as portals: openings to the underworld, entrances to the womb of the earth, or passages between life and death. The depth of the cave and its darkness are not merely spatial—they are existential.

When light vanishes, so does time. The distinction between day and night collapses. What remains is a state of suspension—outside the rhythm of life above ground. The cave can be a place for vision, for transformation, for contact with forces larger than oneself.

In archaeology, caves are often described as “closed spaces,” but the term hardly does justice to their complexity. They are not only physical hollows in the rock; they are also cultural and mental chambers—rooms that humanity has filled with stories, symbols, and signs for tens of thousands of years.

It is no coincidence that so many of the earliest artworks we know were made deep inside caves. People crawled, climbed, and squeezed through narrow tunnels to paint animals, dots, lines, and handprints in the furthest chambers. These were not random decorations but acts that required preparation, courage, and intention.

Standing in front of such paintings today, one senses the convergence of two journeys: the physical movement into the mountain and the mental journey into imagination. The rock surface becomes a membrane between the visible and the invisible, between the present and the eternal.

The paintings seem to hover between worlds—glowing faintly in the beam of a lamp, then vanishing again into stone. They are not simply depictions of animals but presences—manifestations. In the depths of the cave, art was not a representation of life; it was life, inseparable from ritual, survival, and the cosmic order.

The cave, then, is not just the “room at the bottom of the world,” but the origin of the world itself: a primordial chamber where matter and spirit, darkness and light, human and animal could meet and merge.

Neanderthals, Aurignacians, and Cave Paintings

For nearly 400,000 years, Neanderthals were the only humans in Europe. The first modern humans, also referred to as the Aurignacian culture, appeared much later, with the oldest finds dating to around 40,000 years ago. For a long period—roughly 12,000 years—both human types lived on the plains of Southern Europe, until the Neanderthals disappeared around 28,000 years ago. It was the Aurignacians who ventured into deep caves and created the spectacular cave paintings.

The caves with the oldest known paintings are Chauvet in southern France and El Castillo in northern Spain. In Chauvet, the carefully rendered animal bodies are sometimes outlined in charcoal, and these lines have been reliably dated using radiocarbon (14C) methods. The paintings are astonishingly old—36,000 years—more than three times the entire history of Norway, which spans approximately 11,500 years. Equally striking is the immense chronological span of cave art: there are more than 20,000 years between the paintings in Chauvet and those in Altamira, northern Spain. This vast time span suggests that cave paintings did not form a continuous tradition, even though many similarities exist. Notably, depictions of humans—aside from handprints—are largely absent.

The painted images are often naturalistic, large, and vividly colored, primarily in ochre tones of brown, red, and yellow. As mentioned, many figures are outlined in charcoal, and in some areas the lines have been accentuated by scraping white calcite from the cave walls. The figures are remarkably precise, conveying both depth and movement. Many incised figures also exist, and in some cases natural forms in the cave walls were “enhanced” to produce figurative images. Additionally, numerous figures are not immediately recognizable to modern observers, including lines of dots, sticks and strokes, and network-like patterns.

Animals dominate the imagery, often large mammals. It is perhaps surprising that there is not always a clear correspondence between the animals depicted and the key prey species of the time. Most striking is perhaps the scarcity of reindeer—well represented in bones from Ice Age habitation sites in the Dordogne—within the contemporaneous cave paintings. This serves as a reminder that the paintings primarily reflect the symbolic and ritual world of Ice Age humans, rather than the practical realities of daily life.

Nevertheless, archaeological finds outside the caves also provide insight into beliefs and rituals. One notable example is the 30,000-year-old Venus of Willendorf, perhaps the best-known of the well-nourished female figurines from the Ice Age. Such highly nourished figures may have existed in reality, or at least represented an ideal in the pursuit of abundance. Another example is the whistle rattle (or hurre), which produces a shrill or buzzing sound when swung on a cord. A elaborately decorated bone whistle was found at La Roche, France, dating to roughly 16,000–13,000 years ago. Similar instruments are known from Norway, in much later finds dating to around 4,500 years ago.

Both the Venus of Willendorf and these whistle rattles are highlighted in Psychedelic Cave—through both sound and image.. 

Karst Caves, Sea Caves, and Cave Paintings in Norway

Norway also has a large number of karst caves, with around 600 mapped to date—most of them in Nordland. Some are very large, such as Svarthammargrotta near Fauske, with its vast rock chambers and underground water pools. Råggejavri-Raigi in Tysfjord is Norway’s deepest cave, with a vertical difference of 580 meters from the entrance at the top of the mountain to the exit. Tjoarvekrajgge in Sørfold was discovered as recently as 1993. It is not yet fully explored, but so far 18 kilometers of passages have been mapped, making it the longest cave in the Nordic region.

However, Norwegian karst caves do not contain cave paintings and show very few other archaeological traces of human activity. This may be related to the massive ice sheet that covered almost all of Northern Europe during the last Ice Age, when hunter-gatherers further south painted images of large animals in the depths of caves. The last Ice Age reached its maximum extent around 20,000 years ago and lasted from approximately 117,000 to 11,700 years before present.

There are cave paintings in Norway, but they are markedly different from those in Southern Europe: animals are absent, while humans dominate—stenciled red stick figures with round heads, a line for the body, and outstretched arms and legs, rarely more than 30 centimeters tall. Finds from these caves suggest that the paintings date from the Bronze Age, placing them in a completely different cultural-historical context than the Ice Age paintings.

All Norwegian cave paintings appear in so-called “sea caves” along the Norwegian outer coast and, for reasons unknown, seem mostly limited to the caves of Nordland.

The sea caves were created by the constant action of ocean waves, aided by frost weathering under the harsh climate of the Ice Age. Most are found in cliffs with strong exposure to the open sea, often along fault lines and other weaknesses in the rock where the relentless power of the waves could act. The sea caves can be very deep (well over 100 meters) and have high ceilings (20–30 meters).

Post-glacial land uplift has raised many of these sea caves above sea level, leaving them on dry land. As a result, erosion has ceased, allowing both the cave paintings and certain other archaeological finds to be preserved.

Caves: What Do Underground Spaces Do When They Encounter Humans?

The underground, with all that belongs to it—caves and grottoes, graves, crypts, darkness and cold, hell and the underworld, death and evil, being enchanted, the very netherworld—has profoundly shaped our worldview, myths, and folk beliefs. It sits at the opposite end of the scale from all that is above: life and light, the heavens, goodness, where the benevolent gods dwell.

An aversion to what lies beneath the earth is deeply embedded in language, as Robert Macfarlane has noted. Heights are praised, while depths are scorned. To be uplifted is good, far preferable to being downcast. It is not good “when things go downward.”

We humans, and our world, exist in the middle, on the earth, between the above and the below. The attraction to caves and grottoes may be linked to their difference from all that is familiar in life on the surface.

Whether caves are large or small, narrow or with spacious chambers, whether they lie in the Arctic or in tropical regions, what humans encounter inside them has many common features. Not because the caves themselves are physically similar, but because common patterns emerge in the encounter between the cave and the human body with its senses.

Outside the cave, in light and air, surrounded by a living world that buzzes, smells, tastes, with tangible forms—this is where humans are adapted. Two eyes collaborate for depth perception, reading where it is safe to place a foot; ears on either side of the head perceive not only the soundscape but also the direction of sounds. Variation and contrast, temperature and texture against skin and hands, circumference and contour, resonance, color differences and nuances, scents and stinks—all alert you to the world’s dangers and pleasures.

But in caves, all this sensory competence is of limited use. Most of what is present in the daylight is absent. The cave is mostly silent; a raw scent hangs in the air you breathe, unchanging … the broad spectrum of sensory impressions from everyday life shrinks.

… colors and light vanish. You need not go far past the entrance before colors fade and disappear, shades turn to gray, and eventually light itself can no longer reach you. It is not only dark, but the darkness carries the absence of crucial information; even with a light, movement and footing become uncertain. Your beam casts almost as much shadow as light. You must grope, feel with your feet, test for slipperiness before trusting your step.

… sound and resonance, temperature and smell. The acoustic environment is different here among the rock walls. Without light, your hearing loses its usual cooperation with sight; the resonance is altered, and it is no longer easy to judge distance and direction. The cave distorts and confuses, amplifying your own sounds: footsteps on loose stones, the rustle of clothing as you move. Stop, and you become aware of the rhythmic sound of your own pulse against your eardrums. It is noticeably colder inside, and the cold presses on if you remain still. Perhaps you noticed a distinct odor upon entering—a damp, slightly sour, musty smell. But inside the cave, there is only this one smell; your sense of smell is deprived of the wide spectrum of scents from the surface world.

… endless space. You might think it is easy to discern the size of the room, where the cave ends—but you quickly discover that the space you occupy has no clear boundaries. The cave branches off, with voids under collapsed stones and cracks in the walls; it continues beyond your reach. Whatever light you bring also casts shadows above and below your reach. Perhaps a small child could move further, but obviously would not reach the innermost parts. The cave wall acts as a filter, a limit for you, but not for the cave itself. The only certainty is that the cave extends beyond your reach, toward the unknown within, beyond human range, beyond day and the world, much like the bright sky above us. The cave stretches toward the opposite: darkness and lifelessness.

… alluring anxiety. Mostly, you will likely experience a loss of sensory input in the silent darkness. Some may find calm and comfort, but usually the sensory loss brings uncertainty and unease. Try being alone, extinguish your light, sit quietly, and sense the monotonous silence of the dark. One can train to feel familiarity and calm (as shamans, cave painters, miners, and tunnel workers probably did)—but initially, for most people, anxiety lurks. Suddenly, you are not entirely sure you know all the forces present here, and you notice that you are slightly less fearless than when you entered. During the Ice Age, one could not be safe from cave lions or cave bears in the darkness. In Chauvet Cave, the lower part of the wall is lighter—scraping marks made by bears as they oriented themselves along the walls in the dark. One can still see the shallow pits where the bears slept in winter, and the floor is strewn with dozens of cave bear bones. On one stone lay a bear skull. This bears witness to the very real threats in Ice Age caves when the paintings were created.

Perhaps these threats were intensified by beings without visible substance. Humans in deep time likely tended to believe that most things in the world were alive (animism), and caves may have been meeting places for beings not belonging to the surface world but nonetheless present at the edge of the world. The fear of confinement and entrapment still lurks here, even today. We recognize the phenomenon as “claustrophobia,” the paralyzing fear that seizes you when tight spaces grip you. The sensation of being trapped, like feeling the weight of a thousand meters of rock pressing on your shoulders, of suddenly realizing there is no way back except the uncomfortable squeeze through the passages you just passed. The threshold of tolerance can be stretched with practice, and not everyone is prone to this fear. But many must have experienced it, enough that the phenomenon was recognized and talked about.

What ancient people called this fear is unknown, but there is no reason to doubt that humans felt it. In our worldview, claustrophobia is an inner reaction, instinctive and individual, triggered by one’s own senses. But in an animistic worldview, it is just as plausible that the fear that seizes you unexpectedly is a confrontation with something actually present in the deepest darkness. The anxiety and oppressive unease signal no benevolent forces; rather, they are a sense of malevolence, something that wishes you harm.

The encounter between caves and humans is perhaps twofold—a pull toward something alluringly unknown, toward spaces where anything may happen, which at the same time is unsettling and frightening. “Being enchanted” is a recurring theme in folklore—this notion may relate precisely to this experience.

… return to the surface. One final surprise awaits in the encounter with the cave, perhaps the greatest, at least the one you were least prepared for: the experience of emerging back into daylight. Your senses, perhaps because they have been barely used in the sense-deprived darkness, suddenly take in everything familiar, everything so ordinary before entering the cave that you hardly noticed it. The surface world is filled with movement, grasses nodding in the breeze, insects, sunlight and wind, colors, scents of sea or forest, and almost everything produces sound. You feel reborn, new in the familiar, among all that lies beyond ordinary attention and domestic familiarity.

From a phenomenological perspective, we must assume that the richness of senses (and sensory deprivation) was noted and interpreted. But what did people think in the past? What drew them to these spaces? What prejudices, emotions, fears, and actions were unleashed?

Beyond the fact that humans in deep time ventured kilometers into dark passages and painted symbols and precisely rendered animals on the walls, what can we know? Most of human thought and feeling lies at the very edge of archaeological reach. Yet it is worth noting that many human societies have elements of a three-part worldview: our daily, earthly world, tangible and sensory; something above us, higher—the bright sky, the stars pointing toward what is unattainable for us; and an underground world, an opposite world of immovable darkness, lacking almost everything of our earthly world, largely unreachable. Caves and tunnels point toward the underground, reinforcing the notion of a coherent underworld.

… A Journey of Discovery into Timeless Darkness

Most of us have experienced caves in deep darkness and may have sensed some of what is highlighted in the text above. But far fewer have ventured into caves that are not prepared for the public. Show caves, or “tourist caves,” are equipped with lighting (or handed-out lanterns), safe paths with non-slip surfaces, and railings to secure the journey. You can trust that neither you nor your child will fall into a chasm or hit your head on the ceiling. You take for granted that you don’t have to crawl through narrow passages where claustrophobia lurks in the shadows. We assume that the bears have left the darkness and that we can return to daylight without great effort. There is often even a back door—or a lift.

Moreover, the most famous caves with paintings are closed off; the fragile images cannot withstand the moisture from visitors’ breath or the wear of foot traffic. What the public encounters are spectacular replicas of both the caves and the paintings, as in Chauvet, Lascaux, and Altamira. Museums with engaging exhibitions often accompany these, enhancing the experience of the “cave copy.”

In this sense, we may gain a more instructive and exciting understanding of what caves and cave paintings are as phenomena. But perhaps less insight into what the cave and the paintings actually do in the encounter with humans. For humans in deep time, the opposite was likely true: they may have had less objective knowledge about the caves and all that they contained, but their spectrum of experience of “what the cave does” in encountering humans was far greater—enticing, beautiful, and eerie all at once. At best, a torch offered light. Even a good torch is said to emit no more light than an old-fashioned 10W bulb. Moreover, a torch produces a flickering light, which may have brought to life formations that resembled petrified, monster-sized predator jaws as well as the animals painted on the walls. Gaping chasms of unknown depth, narrow passages, and no guarantee of returning to the daylight.

In the Psychedelic Cave project, Mia Habib explores this scarcely accessible borderland at the edge of the world. In the performance, she lets the audience encounter the darkness—which is at once enticing, beautiful, and eerie. The Psychedelic Cave team allows us to experience both the uncertainty and the calm of “sensory loss,” being in a room without scale, feeling the inward gaze when there is nothing left to see, and the relief of finally meeting the light and the familiar world again.

Yet the darkness in this performance is never truly dangerous or risky—unlike the experience of humans in deep time.

Translated into English by ChatGPT

[1] Petersen 1914.
[2] Petersen 1917.
[3] Bjerck 1995; 2012; 2021.
[4] Lauritzen 2024.
[5] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Venus_of_Willendorf 
[6] https://no.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hurre 
[7] Bjerck 2010.
[8] Sandland 2005.
[9] Engevik 2025.
[10] Macfarlane 2019, s.21.
[11] Løøv 2025. 

References:
- Bjerck, H. B., 1995. Malte menneskebilder i ‘Helvete’. Betraktninger om en nyoppdaget hulemaling på Trenyken, Røst, Nordland. Universitetets Oldsaksamling Årbok 1993/1994.
- Bjerck, H.B., 2010. ‘Brummeren fra Tuv’ – tilbakeblikk på samlivet med et lydinstrument fra steinalderen. Primitive Tider 12.
- Bjerck, H. B., 2012. In the outer fringe of the human world: phenomenological perspectives on anthropomorphic cave paintings in Norway. In: Bergsvik, K. A. and Skeates, R., eds. Caves in Context. The Cultural Significance of Caves and Rockshelters in Europe. Oxford: Oxbow Books.
- Bjerck, H.B., 2021. Out of the day, time and life. A phenomenological approach to cavescapes and anthropomorphic paintings. I: Olsen, B. J., M. Burström, C. DeSilvey & Þ. Pétursdóttir (eds.), After Discourse, Things, Affects, Ethics. Routledge : London.
- Engevik, A., 2025. hulemalerier og hellemalinger, Store norske leksikon, https://snl.no/hulemalerier_og_hellemalinger
- Lauritzen, S. E., 2024. Karstgrotte. Store norske leksikon, https://snl.no/karsthule
- Løøv, M., 2025. animisme i Store norske leksikon på snl.no. Hentet 7. oktober 2025 fra https://snl.no/animisme.
- Petersen, Th., 1914. Solsemhulen paa Leka. En boplads fra arktisk stenalder. Foreløpig meddelelse. Oldtiden IV.
- Petersen, Th., 1917. Haugshulen paa Leka. Et nytt hulefund fra ældre jernalder. DKNVS Skrifter 1916 Nr. 4.
- Sandland, I. 2005. Grotter i Nordland. Spennende innmat – grottevandring i Nordland. Den Norske Turistforenings årbok. https://nordlandturselskap.no/grotter-i-nordland/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Venus_of_Willendorf   
https://no.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hurre

Recommended reading:
- Bataille, G., 2009. The Cradle of Humanity: Prehistoric Art and Culture. New York : Zone Books.
- BeauxArts Éditions, 2015. The Grotte Chauvet 2, Ardéche. Paris : BeauxArts & Cie. 
- BeauxArts Éditions, 2016. Lascaux. International Centre for Cave Art. Paris : BeauxArts & Cie.
- Brunel, E., J.-M. Chauvet og C. Hillaire, 2014. The Discovery of the Chauvet-Pont d’Arc Cave. Saint-Remy-de-Provance : Éditions Équinoxe.
- Clottes, J. 2016. What Is Paleolithic Art? - Cave Paintings and the Dawn of Human Creativity. SD Books.
- Clottes, J. og J. Courtin, 1996. The Cave beneath the Sea. Paleolithic Images at Cosquer. New York : Harry N. Abrams Inc.
- Dowd, M., og Hensey, R., 2016. The Archaeology of Darkness. Oxford: Oxbow Books.
- Harari, Y., 2018. Sapiens : en kort historie om menneskeheten. Oslo : Bazar.
- Lorblanchet, M. og P. Bahn, 2017. The First Artists. In Search of the World’s Oldest Art. London : Thames & Hudson Ltd. 
- Macfarlane, R., 2019. Underverden. Livet under jordoverflaten. Oslo : Gyldendal.
- Pettitt, P., 2022. Homo Sapiens Rediscovered : the Scientific Revolution Rewriting our Origins. London : Thames & Hudson.
- Yusoff, K., 2014. Geologic subjects: Nonhuman origins, geomorphic aesthetics and the art of becoming inhuman. Cultural Geographies 22.