Before we can answer this question, we need to think about another one:“what is art?” Art is something people make to share ideas or feelings. It can make others think or feel something too. Art can be many things including music, stories, paintings or drawings.

Cave paintings are often called the first art ever made. However, it's possible the people who created the paintings thought of them as mysterious and powerful, quite different from art as we think of it today.

So who made them, why did they make them, and where can we find them? In a cave called Chauvet in southern France, archaeologists found drawings of animals such as woolly rhinos and mammoths that died out over 10,000 years ago. The people who made the drawings used black charcoal and red ochre – a colour made from crushed-up rocks that were chewed and spat into the artist's hand, then pressed against the cave walls. Similar cave paintings have been found in Australia , India and Somaliland .

Curious Kids is a series by The Conversation that gives children the chance to have their questions about the world answered by experts. If you have a question you'd like an expert to answer, send it to ... and make sure you include the asker's first name, age and town or city. We won't be able to answer every question, but we'll do our very best.

Some people think the cave paintings weren't just for fun or decoration. They believe the drawings were supposed to be a kind of“magic”. By drawing animals like deer or bison, they argue, the person who made the picture (maybe a hunter) thought it would give them magical power over the animal they were hoping to catch.

A long time ago, a Greek thinker named Aristotle said that the point of art was to imitate the world around us. For him, art wasn't just painting or drawing – it also included acting and even giving speeches. Because artists used their hands to make things, people thought of them like workers or craftspeople – similar to cooks, hairdressers, or blacksmiths.

In 13th- and 14th-century Europe, art was mostly connected to the church, and was made to help people feel closer to God. Artists were part of groups called guilds, based on the kind of work they did, and people saw them more as skilled workers than as creative individuals.

It wasn't until the 15th and 16th centuries, known as the Renaissance in Europe, that artists began to see themselves as creators, not just craftsmen. A big change happened in 1436 when a man named Leon Battista Alberti wrote a famous book called On Painting , which claimed that art was just as important as poetry and science. His ideas had a huge effect in the city of Florence in Italy, where three very famous artists worked: Leonardo da Vinci , Michelangelo and Raphael .

People started to think more about artists as special individuals, which was shown in another important book, Lives of the Artists , written by Giorgio Vasari in 1550.

Art began to be divided into two groups. The first was called the“fine arts”, which included painting, sculpture and drawing. These were seen as more important because they expressed big ideas and emotions. The second group was called the“decorative arts”, like glass-making, wood-carving and book decorations. These were thought to be less important because they were more about looking nice or being useful.

In the late 19th century, people started to like the decorative arts more, because artists wanted to focus on handmade things instead of factory-made items. But painting was still seen as the most important kind of art. Then, in 1914, a French artist named Marcel Duchamp changed how people thought about art.

He started using everyday objects and turning them into art just by choosing them and signing them. He called these“readymades”. His most famous one was called Fountain – it was actually a type of toilet (a urinal) that he signed with a fake name,“R. Mutt”, and tried to put in an art show in New York in 1917. Duchamp said that picking an ordinary object and calling it art was enough to make it art, because the artist made the choice.

Duchamp helped change art by showing that it isn't just about painting or making statues – it's also about ideas.

Today, many artists use their work to talk about important issues and to make people think. In this way, they are no different from the artists of the past – such as the first cave dwellers who exerted power over their prey, or Duchamp, who challenged the very meaning of art.

And so the answer to the question“who invented art?” is quite simple. Humankind invented art – from the moment we were able to trace a pattern in the sand, or transfer a simple idea to the wall of a cave.

MENAFN10102025000199003603ID1110179826