The discovery of palaeolithic art in western and central Europe in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries was one of the most striking developments within the new and publicly prominent scholarly field of human prehistory, with implications which cut across the cultural, "deep time" and evolutionary sciences. At La Madeleine, Les Eyzies, Altamira, Dolní Věstonice, and a host of other sites, carved bones, wall-paintings and statuettes were discovered depicting long-extinct animals, abstract designs and a few rare human figures. These mysterious productions needed to be worked into existing frames of knowledge. Yet how this was to be done split scientific and scholarly communities. Debates over authenticity - either of the field as a whole, or of individual pieces - were frequently expressed. Meanwhile, the representative nature of much of the material gave many the idea that prehistoric artists were crude copyists, lacking abstract thought and at a low and undeveloped mental level. However, the apparent ceremonial nature of many of the productions and their complexity and technical skill moved other interpretations beyond this, perhaps showing that human drives towards creativity were built in at an ancient period. Moreover, a continual comparison of prehistoric art with the art of "primitive" societies and children, and the increased regard for palaeolithic archaeology as a documenter of human social, cultural, mental and "racial" evolution, ensured that these finds were given a wide relevance.

This paper will look upon how these discoveries worked across numerous disciplinary boundaries - including psychology, palaeontology, art-theory, archaeology, neurology and physical anthropology - and also national ones, as finds and sites in western and central Europe were compared with artistic productions of a range of peoples within the international fields of prehistoric archaeology and human evolutionary studies. In this process, notions of race, aesthetics, mental evolution, gender, and humanity's relationship to the natural world intermixed. Examining the theories and observations of Gabriel de Mortillet, Edouard Piette, Henry Fairfield Osborn, Henri Breuil, and Moritz Hoernes, this paper will consider the interplay between these areas, as working knowledge of the art of the Palaeolithic into a comprehensible framework became a means of engaging with the mind of primitive man, and clarifying human capacities for knowledge and creativity.