What sets this art apart is people. In the celebrated cave paintings of the Upper Paleolithic - the bison and horses of Altamira and Lascaux - human beings barely appear. Here, in what specialists call Levantine art, the human figure takes centre stage. Men run down deer with bows drawn; women dance; climbers raid bees' nests; warriors clash. The scenes are full of movement and story, small figures caught mid-stride, mid-shot, mid-fall. Where earlier cave art gives us animals in isolation, this art gives us drama - the earliest surviving pictures, in Europe, of humans doing the things that filled their days.

The name confuses people, so it is worth clearing up: 'Levantine' here means eastern Spain, not the eastern Mediterranean. The 727 rock shelters, caves and ravine walls recognised by UNESCO stretch from the Pyrenees south to Granada, spread across six regions. The Valencian Community alone holds 301 of them, more than any other, with major concentrations also in Aragon, Castile-La Mancha, Murcia and Andalusia. It is the largest gathering of such rock art anywhere in Europe. According to UNESCO the oldest paintings date to around 8,000 BC and the most recent to about 3500 BC - a span of some 4,500 years, during which the people who made them were slowly shifting from a hunter-gatherer life toward the first farming.

Hunting dominates, and the bow is everywhere, drawn oversized as the era's supreme weapon. Painters solved the problem of distance with real ingenuity, sketching the trail of a fleeing animal to show the gap between archer and prey. Animals gallop in the 'flying gallop' pose - all four legs stretched clear of the ground - a convention art would keep using until the invention of photography proved it wrong. There are battles, too, some crowded with dozens of figures: at Cova del Roure in Morella la Vella, three archers are ringed by four; at Les Dogue in Ares del Maestrat, eleven are set upon by seventeen. There are even scenes of execution. And there is ceremony: at the Caves of El Cogul, eleven women in skirts are painted circling in a dance that has puzzled and fascinated viewers for over a century.

For all their drama, the figures are tiny, often only a few centimetres tall, and painted with striking economy in one or two colours. The pigments were simple - reddish mineral earths and charcoal - and the artists seem to have applied them with feathers, outlining the bodies after filling them in. What has preserved these fragile images for millennia is chance chemistry: a whisper-thin film of limescale, left by water trickling down the rock, that sealed the paint beneath a transparent glaze. The bestiary is dominated by goats, the most frequently painted animal, alongside deer, boar and cattle. One wall at Selva Pascuala even appears to show a row of mushrooms - possibly a hallucinogenic species - hinting at a symbolic world we can only guess at.

This whole tradition was unknown to modern eyes until 1903, when the first examples came to light in Teruel and the prehistorian Juan Cabré began to study them. They are not easy paintings to protect. Most survive in shallow rock shelters and ravine caves - the kind of steep, sunlit gorges that were useless to farmers but ideal for ambushing game - and their state of conservation is often poor. Spain declared them cultural monuments in 1985, and communities have created cultural parks and interpretation centres to safeguard the most important sites. To stand before one of these panels is to meet the artists across an unimaginable gulf of time, and to recognise, in a running hunter or a climbing honey-gatherer, someone entirely like ourselves.