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Do you, by chance, watch the History channel?

Spend some time around kids. Rock art is completely obvious.

After a few thousand nights in a cave with nothing to do, drawing on the walls with some charcoal from your fire is what every human probably did, and would do even today.

Switching to red ochre is just one step away from that.

Even chimps are known to scratch figures in the dirt.

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What I find interesting about this explanation is that it suggests a much more limited scope of decision-making than is often attributed to humans. A practical example of why this could matter is that instead of spreading an idea through viral mechanisms where an information is transmitted between individuals, this would provide an illustration of how an idea could be spread by replicating conditions and causing the idea to essentially regenerate in a predictable manner among disconnected individuals, while from each individual’s perspective they are doing something novel.