I used to think visual storytelling started with Instagram.
Then I spent three weeks in southern France, staring at ochre handprints in the Chauvet Cave, and realized humans have been doing this—this desperate need to show rather than tell—for roughly 40,000 years, give or take a few millennia. The paintings there aren’t just pictures of bison and horses. They’re sequences. Movement captured in overlapping charcoal lines, a technique animators would recgonize instantly. One panel shows a pride of lions mid-hunt, their bodies positioned to suggest motion across the rock face, and I remember thinking: someone understood frame-by-frame storytelling before we had words for it. The artists used the cave wall’s natural contours to create depth, making a bulge in the limestone become a bison’s shoulder. That’s not decoration, that’s cinematography.
Here’s the thing—every major shift in visual media has been about collapsing distance between teller and audience. Egyptian tomb paintings used hierarchical scale and registers, stacking scenes vertically like a modern comic strip. Medieval illuminated manuscripts crammed margins with visual asides and commentary. The Bayeux Tapestry is literally a 230-foot narrative film strip from 1077.
When Photography Tried to Kill Painting But Created Something Else Instead
The 1839 invention of photography should have ended illustrative art, or so everyone predicted. Turns out—and I guess this is obvious now—it just forced painters to get weirder and more emotionally direct. The Impressionists stopped caring about photorealistic detail and started chasing light and feeling. Edvard Munch’s “The Scream” isn’t anatomically accurate, but you can feel that anxiety in your chest. Photography became its own narrative medium: Eadweard Muybridge’s sequential horse photos from the 1870s proved all four hooves leave the ground during a gallop, but they also accidentally invented the visual grammar for analyzing motion, which directly fed into early cinema. Wait—maybe that wasn’t accidental at all.
By the time the Lumière brothers projected “Arrival of a Train” in 1895, audiences allegedly fled the theater in terror. Within thirty years, Eisenstein was using montage theory to create emotional manipulation through editing, cutting between a baby carriage and a soldier’s boot to generate dread. Film didn’t just tell stories, it rewired how humans process visual information.
Digital media collapsed everything.
Why Your Brain Processes TikTok Exactly Like Cave Paintings, Except Faster and More Addictive
Modern platforms use the same core techniques as ancient storytellers—sequence, emotion, movement—but compressed into dopamine-optimized packets. A 15-second TikTok video employs jump cuts (montage theory), text overlays (illuminated manuscript marginalia), reaction shots (Egyptian registers showing simultaneous events), and trending audio (oral tradition). The average viewer processes these elements automatically, the same way our ancestors parsed those Chauvet lion hunts. Honestly, the only real difference is speed and volume. We’ve gone from one cave painting viewed by maybe hundreds of people over generations, to billions of visual stories consumed daily. The human brain hasn’t evolved much in 40,000 years, but our delivery mechanisms definately have.
Neuroscience research from Stanford in 2019 showed that visual narratives activate the same brain regions regardless of medium—whether you’re looking at Lascaux cave art or a Marvel movie, your temporal lobe and prefrontal cortex light up identically. We’re pattern-recognition machines hunting for meaning in images. Every innovation, from ochre pigments to After Effects, has just been about refining that ancient contract between the person with something to show and the person desperate to see it. The technology changes but the hunger doesn’t.
