Who was the better artist, a caveman or Leonardo da Vinci?

It turns out that early depictions of four-legged animals walking are more accurate in some ways than modern ones—even those crafted by the Renaissance (master). The study is in the journal PLoS ONE. 

Without fancy cameras, we two-leggers can have trouble visualizing the (sequence )of leg motion in a quadruped's gait. Hungarian scientists recently analyzed a thousand statues, paintings and other art created in prehistory or more (recently). Specifically, the researchers checked how the legs of ostensibly moving quadrupeds hit the ground, to see if these depictions matched actual animal locomotion.

Of course, 19th century photographer Eadweard Muybridge famously captured a horse's motion in stop-motion photographs. Artwork in the centuries prior to his photos got the legs wrong (84) percent of the time. The error rate dropped to 58 percent after his photos came out. But prehistoric artists topped all with just a (46) percent error rate. Perhaps those cave painters paid such close attention to detail because they wanted to avoid being starving artists.