Agency, art and altered consciousness: a motif in French (Quercy) Upper Palaeolithic parietal art

Is the meaning of prehistoric art beyond recovery — especially the meaning of early art in deep caves, a remote and strange location which itself suggests some out-of-the-ordinary purpose? David Lewis-Williams has been extending his explorations of meaning in later southern African rock-art to the famous enigma of the European Palaeolithic, here in the particulars of a single distinctive motif.