Humans started drawing animals the moment they started killing them. The earliest recorded artworks—paintings on the cave walls of Lascaux in southern France—are from the Palaeolithic era, about 20,000 years ago. This was when they "developed weapons to hunt big game" and "sophisticated forms of hunting." It was the first mass extinction caused by human activity.
The Lascaux paintings show the slaughter that was happening outside the cave walls: stampedes of stags, bison, mammoths, and lions being felled by arrow-wielding stick figures. The way they're depicted is haunting in its realism, almost sacred. Even though our ancestors were starting to kill animals en masse, they painted them with a kind of trembling reverence

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