Painting of a male deer with large antlers. Lascaux cave, Dordogne, France, about 20,000 years B.P. The Upper Palaeolithic is sometimes called “Reindeer Age”, because the remains of ancient settlement sites have revealed a great quantity of deer bones, that evidently represented the main prey of the prehistoric hunters. Nevertheless, in cave art deer appear only rarely and reindeer does not exceeds 4% of the images. This fact suggests that animals were not represented according to their importance as material resources, but because they carried symbolic and spiritual meanings, which today are rather difficult to detect.

[Image: http://www.decouvrir-la-france.com/dordogne/grotte-lascaux.htm]