One possibility is that the shift in subsistence and mobility patterns associated with the postglacial environment — from a world dominated by the great herds of ice-age megafauna to a world of forest-adapted, more diversified hunting — affected the specific practices of representation.

Another is that Mesolithic art was produced on perishable materials — wood, skin, bark — that do not survive in the archaeological record.

Another is that the cave art of the Paleolithic had specific ceremonial functions tied to specific aspects of Paleolithic life that changed in the Mesolithic.

Gough’s Cave itself is one of the caves where the Paleolithic inhabitants left traces — not cave paintings, but the worked bones and tools of the earlier occupation.

Cheddar Man, who came to the cave roughly 4,000 to 5,000 years after the Paleolithic occupants, inhabited a cultural world that was in some ways continuous with the Paleolithic and in other ways different.