These dates, the earliest in the world for paintings, overturn our previous conceptions of parietal art. We have long known that between 35,000 and 30,000 years ago the Aurignacians of southern Germany created sophisticated portable art in the form of ivory statuettes with both naturalistic and stylized features. This demonstrated that theories of a linear evolution of art, with crude beginnings in the Aurignacian, followed by continual progress over thousands of years, were not well founded. The surprisingly original and "evolved" art of the Chauvet-Pont-d'Arc cave, which is contemporary with the statuettes, proves that the artistic inventiveness of the Aurignacians could just as well be applied to the painting and engraving of cave walls.

Our current problem is to understand the relationships between the artists of the Ardèche, and those from the Swabian Jura. Despite their small number, the statuettes from Vogelherd and Geissenklösterle represent subjects identical to those at the Chauvet-Pont-d'Arc cave: mammoths, felines, bison, bear , horses and rhinoceroses. At the site of Hohlenstein-Stadel, there even exists a composite being with the body of a human and head of a lion. Do these convergences indicate direct relations between southern Germany and the Ardèche region via the Rhine and Rhône valleys? Were the mythic themes of this time really different from those that would come after, when horses and bison would become as dominant as rhinoceroses and felines were before? Or was this phenomenon chronologically and geographically limited?