Perched high in the Mongolian Altai Mountains, a massive glacial boulder looms over the Baga Oigor Gol valley. Etched onto its weathered face is a haunting image: a bull elk with coiled antlers like unfurling wings, a birdlike beak, and a surreal, almost mythical posture.
It is not just an animal—it is a symbol transformed over centuries into a vessel of cultural memory and identity.
A new study has mapped the evolution of this iconic creature across 12,000 years of rock art, revealing a stunning transformation from realistic depictions of elk in the late Paleolithic to highly stylized, almost unrecognizable forms by the early Iron Age.
The research, published in the Cambridge Archaeological Journal, suggests that these changes in Mongolian rock art mirror profound shifts in environment, society, and psychological worldviews across generations of steppe cultures.
“Beginning as an image reflecting a primitive, monumental realism, it was transformed into an expression of vital naturalism in the Bronze Age,” lead author and professor of Asian Art at the University of Oregon, Dr. Esther Jacobson-Tepfer, writes. “By the end of the Bronze Age, the image began to shift into a highly stylized emblem of status, clan identity, or perhaps gender, finally degenerating into a wolf-like beast.”
Dr. Jacobson-Tepfer’s study focuses on hundreds of petroglyphs scattered across the Altai’s remote rock outcrops. Initially, during the late Ice Age, elk were portrayed with striking realism—solid bodies, clear anatomical features, and stances suggesting life in the wild.
These interpretations of elk imagery echo discoveries in eastern France, where archaeologists uncovered 12,000-year-old cave art depicting elk with striking realism, down to precise musculature and detailed antler branching.
These findings reveal that early artists employed techniques resembling animation to convey movement and behavior, reflecting a sophisticated understanding of animal anatomy and ecology.

(Image Source: Esther Jacobson-Tepfer/Cambridge Archaeological Journal/ Photo by: Gary Tepfer)
However, by the late Bronze Age, Mongolian rock art began depicting elk with elongated and fantastical antlers and birdlike features. Some elk were adorned with antlers so elaborate they resembled decorative wings. Others bore twisted necks or crouching bodies that evoked wolves or mythic beasts.
This shift, Dr. Jacobson-Tepfer argues, reflects a broader psychological and cultural evolution triggered by both ecological degradation and changing patterns of mobility and social identity.
As forest cover shrank and elk habitats retreated due to a cooling and drying climate around 2000 BCE, elk themselves became scarce in the region. Simultaneously, pastoralists began adopting horse-riding and more mobile lifestyles, changing how they interacted with animals, space, and time.
“The radical de-naturing of the elk image indicates that earlier frames of reference joining the individual to the phenomenal world had weakened and were falling away, replaced by concerns with social identity and status,” Dr. Jacobson-Tepfer writes.
This emblematic turn, she suggests, was also tied to the rise of social stratification and political complexity across the steppe. As nomadic societies expanded and became more militarized—evident in extensive burial grounds filled with weapons and gold-decorated gear—animal imagery also evolved into signals of power and identity. Riders depicted on rocks wore stylized elk tattoos. They carried bronze or gold elk emblems, turning the animal into a personal and tribal totem.
In frequent occurrences, highly stylized elk are deliberately carved over an earlier hunting scene featuring a naturalistic elk “as if in a statement of extreme aggressivity,” Jacobson-Tepfer writes. In another, the elk’s features have fused so completely with a wolf’s that its identity becomes ambiguous, a haunting chimera of natural and symbolic meaning.

The paper also draws connections to other Scythian cultures of the Eurasian steppe, including the famous Arzhan burials in southern Siberia. There, gold plaques from the 8th century BCE depict elk and other animals in the same stylized, compressed forms as those found in Altai rock art. These plaques, used in headdresses and saddles, likely served as portable templates for the same images carved into stone.
This correlation between portable art and Mongolian rock art imagery suggests a feedback loop between symbolic expression and social identity—what began as observed reality eventually became cultural shorthand.
By the Iron Age, Jacobson-Tepfer notes, elk had largely vanished from the Altai’s environment—and from its rock art. The few that remained were so transformed they could hardly be recognized as the same animal. Their disappearance, both literal and symbolic, marked the end of an era when humans depicted animals not just as food or threats but as kin and spiritual mirrors.
Taken together with past research, these findings show how ancient art is more than a record of what people saw. It is a tale of what they believed, how they adapted, and how, in the face of environmental loss, they reshaped the creatures they once revered into emblems of identity, mythology, and power.
“The history of the elk image in the Mongolian Altai offers a view from within the mindset of generations of people,” Dr. Jacobson-Tepfer concludes. “[It is] a reflection of the affective life of culture as significant as the material remains of sub-soil archaeology.”
Tim McMillan is a retired law enforcement executive, investigative reporter and co-founder of The Debrief. His writing typically focuses on defense, national security, the Intelligence Community and topics related to psychology. You can follow Tim on Twitter: @LtTimMcMillan. Tim can be reached by email: tim@thedebrief.org or through encrypted email: LtTimMcMillan@protonmail.com
