The "jizz" hypothesis in cave paintings
- David Moreno
- Dec 22, 2025
- 4 min read
The jizz hypothesis is the one defended by the philosopher, Baptiste Morizot, in his latest work: The Lost Gaze, at the Origin of Animal Cave Art. According to him, cave paintings are first and foremost representations of the jizz of animals, that is to say, reproductions of their silhouette, their visual signature.
In 2016, after fourteen days tracking large animals (bison, grizzly bears, black bears, wolves) in Yellowstone National Park, Baptiste Morizot sat on a bench in Jackson Hole, Wyoming, facing a rock face. His senses heightened and his body weary, he soon saw the shapes of wild animals emerging from the limestone. From this experience, an idea was born in the philosopher's mind concerning animal cave art. He wondered if Paleolithic humans had also glimpsed the silhouettes (the jizz) of animals in the rock of their shelters before painting them.
What is jizz?
The concept of "jizz" is difficult to define precisely, but we can attempt to approximate it. Originating in the field of naturalists, "jizz" refers in ornithology to the immediate visual impression a bird makes, even before consciousness has time to analyze its details. " It's an act of identification that is faster than analytical thought itself [...] It's a concept whose obviousness and relevance are demonstrated in the field ," writes Baptiste Morizot. The idea of a glimpsed silhouette of an animal moving in its natural environment is certainly a simplification, but remains relevant in a popularization approach.
Some suggest that "jizz" is a phonetic transcription of the initials GISS ( General Impression of Shape and Size ), used by the Royal Air Force during World War II. Pilots and crew members were trained to identify Allied and enemy aircraft at a glance, in order to recognize German planes as quickly as possible.
Another etymological hypothesis, although seemingly far removed as it is part of the French language, is that "jizz" comes from "guise", which designates a behavior or a way of being, as in the expression "à votre guise".
Seeing animals in stone
The act of seeing shapes (here, animal shapes) is called pareidolia in the psychology of perception (from the Greek para- , "false," and eidos , "appearance, form"). It is the same process at work when we imagine seeing faces in the clouds.
For the Paleolithic hunter-gatherer, as for the naturalist of today, seeing animals before being seen by them is a true obsession. So much so that they intensely train their eyes to decode the presence of animals on the great plains. It is not uncommon in this case to mistake a bush or a tree stump for an animal's jizz as part of an optical illusion. In fact, seeing an animal where it is not is a common experience. And Baptiste Morizot continues: " If the motivation to find animals by sight is strong, and if the skill is highly practiced, memorized, and intensified, then this power can be activated and expressed in contexts where a microscopic or vague stimulus presents itself to the subject. For example, a relief in the rock." "In this context of over-trained observation, the pareidolia of seeing jizz of animals emerge in the rock is an experience that can be assumed to be very plausible for the prehistoric hunter-gatherer.
The mystery of the invariance of forms
A major enigma of cave art is the presence of the same styles of animal representation, both over long periods of time (for example, between Chauvet, 20,000 years ago, and Lascaux, 10,000 years ago) and across a vast geographical area (from the Atlantic to the Urals). How can this persistence be explained?
The jizz hypothesis can answer this question. There is something shared over thousands of years, across all of Europe: a common way of life, a similar relationship with animals, similar subsistence conditions, and the same steppe landscapes. The same visual context was therefore shared, which led to the representation of jizz. It is the jizz that gives the paintings of Chauvet and Lascaux a family resemblance , even though they are distinctly different.
Let Baptiste Morizot speak about these jizz-like images: " What makes them common and what seems so original to us, as I will argue here, is that each time their hand sought to do justice to the perceptual, memorial, affective and probably aesthetic experience of the jizz-like form of the animal. "
The enigma of the absence of a background
The absence of a background is explained by the particularly active vision of the person tracking large animals. This creates a tunnel vision effect, well described in target sports like archery, where vision accelerates in a straight tube connecting the eye to the target, eliminating everything around it. The result is a blurring of everything surrounding the targeted silhouette. Only the jizz shape of the targeted animal matters. One consequence of the tunnel vision effect is the cancellation of the background, in favor of the targeted or jizzed animal. For the same reasons, the tunnel vision effect also explains the absence of ground representation in cave art: the entire context is rejected, including the ground.
And Baptiste Morizot explains: “ The tunnel vision effect, which is activated […] when the eye tries to ‘aim’ in the sense of identifying a still mysterious animal form, […] cancels out the background, rejects the background. In such a way that the jizz image of the animal […] has every reason to be captured as if floating on a formless background. ”
Conclusion
If there is one thing that Paleolithic humans teach us, as evidenced by cave paintings, it is the predominant relationship they maintained with non-human living beings. Baptiste Morizot concludes his work by writing: “ We must not return to the Paleolithic [culture of life], find the same one, but invent another, linked to our modes of subsistence, and to the political metamorphoses that transform them. The pollinators that bring spring […] will be our mammoths, the soil fauna that secretly shapes our harvests will be our bison, the forests that produce animal oxygen will be our wild horses, and the phytoplankton that absorb the deadly carbon from oil tankers in the coffers of their alien bodies will be our cave bears. ”
This text is the result of an automated translation. The first version of this text (in French) is available at the following address:
Source :
Baptiste Morizot, The Lost Gaze: At the Origin of Animal Cave Art , Essay, Actes Sud, 2025
Interview in French
