A theory offered as an interpretation of the Stone Age art at Lascaux is the so-called "sympathetic magic theory". Championed by Abbe Henri Breuil, one of the leading French scholars of prehistoric art, it claims that Lascaux artists created their drawings and paintings of animals in an attempt to put them under a spell and thus achieve dominance over them. In other words, artists painted pictures of wounded bison in the hope that this type of primitive "visualization" might make the imagined scene actually happen. Unfortunately, this interpretation of Lascaux's cave art is not very convincing. Second, at Chauvet cave, in the Ardeche, very few if any of the animal pictures relate to animals that were hunted: most were predators, like lions.
