Earliest Animal Art and Realism

We were talking in class last night about the fact that our earliest art subject (some 25,000 years ago) was the nonhuman animal, and how the realistic depictions of nonhuman animals in Paleolithic cave paintings challenge John Berger's notion that nonhuman animals first enter human imagination as metaphors and symbols. Most likely they were both real and symbolic, but their representations appear realistic. Here's a link to a NYT article that addresses that realism:

spotted horses in cave art weren't just a figment, dna shows