Hundreds of 26,000-year-old engravings found in Catalan cave

Archaeologists have described hundreds of rock-art engravings dating back around 26,000 years in a cave frequently visited by tourists in Catalonia, a region of northeastern Spain that was thought to be almost devoid of palaeolithic art. The findings were published in the journal Antiquity on 5 November.

Discovery in a visited cave

Josep Maria Vergès Bosch, an archaeologist at the Catalan Institute of Human Paleoecology and Social Evolution (IPHES-CERCA) in Tarragona, Spain, spotted some prehistoric engravings among more-modern graffiti in the Cova de la Font Major during a planned excavation in 2019.

Vergès and archaeologist Míriam Salas-Altès at IPHES-CERCA studied 280 Palaeolithic art motifs, including 55 animal depictions, from the cave. “The sheer quantity of art discovered at the Cova de la Font Major is exceptional,” says Salas-Altès.

Early animation techniques

The cave system — made up of more than 3.5 kilometres of underground passageways that have been occupied numerous times during human history — has been open to the public for some seven decades and became a museum in the 1990s.

The drawings were easy to miss. “When you shine a light straight on the engravings, they are really difficult to see, you have to play with light from different directions to see the depressions,” says Salas-Altès.

The etchings include images of animals such as a horse, a bear and an aurochs (the ancestor of domestic cattle), as well as myriad swirling lines. A handful of the engravings reveal how the artists used “natural lines or fissures in the walls”, says Salas-Altès. For example, “one is used to represent the ground under a horse”.

Why it matters

• The Cova de la Font Major is in Catalonia, northeastern Spain, a region previously thought to be almost devoid of palaeolithic art.
• Researchers studied 280 Palaeolithic art motifs, including 55 animal depictions, dating back around 26,000 years.
• Some engravings use natural lines or fissures in the cave walls to create effects such as representing the ground under a horse.

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Sources

• nature.com: The palaeo cave art that hid in plain sight for 26,000 years | Nature

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