Scholars have long debated why the animal figures in certain prehistoric cave paintings so rarely overlap with images of humans. One school interprets the separation as evidence of a symbolic taboo: humans and prey, in this view, belonged to distinct ritual categories that could not be depicted together. A competing account is more deflationary. It notes that human figures are scarce throughout the corpus regardless of context, and that the apparent separation may simply reflect this overall rarity rather than any deliberate rule. Proponents of the symbolic reading counter that rarity alone cannot explain the consistency of the pattern across widely separated sites. The disagreement persists partly because the surviving sample is small and partly because neither side can test its claims against the intentions of artists who left no written record.