<p>Art making, understood as making music, dancing, and producing visual artworks, has a deep evolutionary history. Traces of musical instruments, figurative arts, and rock art, like engravings and cupules, are found all around Europe, Asia, and Africa since the Pleistocene. The debate about the evolution of art making has produced many theories of how arts evolved in humans’ deep past. In this article, I add my contribution to one of the debate’s most influential positions, Ellen Dissanayake’s account of art making, focusing in particular on her explanation of the antecedents of arts, i.e., mother–infant interaction. I first integrate Dissanayake’s account of ape infant behavior with new evidence from comparative studies and develop a new approach to build an account of the hominin <i>suite</i> of behaviors in the context of parental care using evidence from cognitive paleoanthropology and comparative neurobiology. I then propose a novel method to identify, in the fossil record, the evolution of arts as described by Dissanayake. These two lines of research are importantly intertwined: I suggest that changes in hominin parental care may help identify new cognitive skills relevant for tracing the origin and early developments of arts. I conclude that the capacity of art making may have evolved multiple times since the Middle Pliocene (≈4 mya) in different hominin lineages.</p>