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Stone Age occupants of Europe had a strange fixation on horses. Almost one in every three animals they depicted on cave walls was a horse and the images are often larger and occupy more prominent positions than those of other animals. However, why the horse loomed so large in ancient minds may remain forever a mystery.

Since the 1990s, Georges Sauvet at the University of Toulouse-Jean Jaur猫s, France, has been compiling a database of European Stone Age (or Palaeolithic) art. Today that database contains information on more than 4700 drawings, paintings and engravings of animals found in caves across France and Spain. The oldest image may be more than 30,000 years old and the youngest roughly 12,000 years old.

Sauvet has begun analysing the information and has realised something odd: no matter where or when artists were at work in Stone Age France and Spain, they were very likely to put horses in their pictures. Some 29.5 per cent of all the animals in Sauvet鈥檚 database are horses, with three-quarters of all sites across his study area containing at least one image of a horse.

Impressive though these raw numbers are, they don鈥檛 tell the whole story. Sauvet has also looked at the way Stone Age artists portrayed horses and found additional evidence of their special status. For instance, the ancient artists tended to depict all animals 鈥� including lions, mammoths and bears 鈥� in profile with the head to the left. The horse is different: it is the only species that is predominantly orientated to the right.

Even the location and size of horses in the ancient murals stand out as special. Artists often chose to depict horses on high and particularly conspicuous surfaces, writes Sauvet. For instance, in Lascaux cave, France, there is a pair of large horses 鈥� one is 2.5 metres long 鈥� on the ceiling. Sauvet writes that they hang above and dominate the hundreds of smaller animals drawn on the walls below. A horse in Rouffignac cave, also in France, is even larger, at 2.7 metres long. There are 65 animals drawn around it, including mammoth and rhinoceros, but all are far smaller.

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Archaeologists have previously observed this focus on horses in European Stone Age art, says April Nowell at the University of Victoria in Canada, but she says Sauvet鈥檚 database provides more comprehensive evidence that confirms the pattern.

Paul Pettitt at Durham University in the UK agrees. 鈥淲e may certainly regard Late Upper Palaeolithic hunter-gatherers as 鈥榟orse people鈥�,鈥� he says 鈥� .

What makes this focus on horses particularly striking is that the animals weren鈥檛 all that abundant in Stone Age Europe, says Randall White at New York University, and in at least some regions, horse flesh seems to have made up only a small part of diets. 鈥淚n the sites I鈥檝e excavated in south-west France, horse is always a minor player,鈥� he says. 鈥淚 excavate sites with 70 to 90 per cent reindeer: that鈥檚 what people are eating.鈥�

This tells us that artists didn鈥檛 choose to draw and paint horses because they were an important food resource, says White. There was clearly more going on. 鈥淭here was something special about horses.鈥�

Sauvet suspects horses had cultural significance to the Stone Age European communities. He argues they had developed a belief system in which animals were arranged in some sort of hierarchy, a bit like the pantheon of Ancient Greek gods. In the same way that Zeus ruled over the other Greek gods, Sauvet suggests the horse reigned at the top of this Stone Age hierarchy.

That is pushing the evidence too far, says Nowell. 鈥淲e don鈥檛 know that [horses] were thought of as gods or that one animal 鈥榬eigned鈥� over another,鈥� she says.

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鈥淲e don鈥檛 have a lot of theoretical tools to interpret this,鈥� says White. 鈥淲e鈥檙e dealing with Palaeolithic societies 鈥� we don鈥檛 know how they organised the animal world in their own perception of things.鈥�

Although we can鈥檛 be sure exactly why horses were culturally significant, Sauvet鈥檚 data is important for demonstrating that this significance was shared across a geographically wide area and for a long time. 鈥淭hat is pretty incredible,鈥� says Genevieve von Petzinger, also at the University of Victoria.

Von Petzinger is also interested in looking for regionwide patterns in Stone Age art. She has discovered that pop up again and again in caves across western Europe, perhaps suggesting they served as a form of widely understood Stone Age code.

The horses provide an interesting parallel example, says von Petzinger. They could be further evidence that culture and beliefs were shared across western Europe, even at a time when the region was so sparsely populated that it may have been relatively challenging for different groups to meet and communicate ideas.