More Paintings Rumored Near Lascaux

Another cave containing prehistoric paintings may exist just four kilometers from the famous Lascaux caves in southwestern France. The original cave art at Lascaux was found in 1940, and attracted hordes of visitors until it was closed to the public in 1983 to protect the artwork.

A group of teenagers near the town of Montignac discovered in 1940 a complex network of Paleolithic caves with a series of 17,000-year-old frescos. According to Archaeology News Network:

The rumors of a second cave covered in pre-historic artwork have been circulating for years, but it appears local authorities are now ready to take them seriously after one local family shared an extraordinary secret they had kept to themselves for half a century. 

According to French media reports this week, preliminary investigations by the town’s mayor, as well as authorities in the Dordogne region, have proved promising enough to warrant a more detailed probe into a patch of land 4 km from the site of the Lascaux caves. 

 “There’s no certainty, and we are still quite far from having the necessary evidence to confirm the existence of another decorated cave,” Montignac mayor Laurent Mathieu told French daily Le Figaro this week. 

 Despite that caution, however, Mathieu did confirm that the culture department of the Dordogne regional administration would soon be mapping out a 10-hectare area for “further research.” This region will also be placed under surveillance, to prevent amateur archaeologists from conducting their own, unsupervised investigations.

The possibility of a second discovery near the town came about in August, when an elderly local woman told the mayor that her husband – who had died in August – had come across a cave with prehistoric frescos back in 1962, but had covered the entrance for fear of bringing hassle on himself. The secret had stayed in the family for 51 years, until she finally shared it with the mayor.

Image: Researcher examining paintings in the original Lascaux chamber.

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Were Neanderthals Earliest Artists?

Detail from the El Castillo Cave in Spain.

The unexpected old age of some European cave paintings raise the possibility that Neanderthals rather than Homo sapiens were the earliest painters ~ either that, or humans began painting earlier than previously thought.

“It would not be surprising if the Neanderthals were indeed Europe’s first cave artists,” says João Zilhão, an archaeologist at Spain’s University of Barcelona.

According to Wired.com:

Researchers led by Zilhão and Alistair Pike of the United Kingdom’s University of Bristol measured the ages of 50 paintings in 11 Spanish caves. The art, considered evidence of sophisticated symbolic thinking, has traditionally been attributed to modern humans, who reached Europe about 40,000 years ago. 

Traditional methods of dating cave paintings, however, are relatively clumsy. Even the previous best technique — carbon dating, or translating amounts of carbon molecule decay into measurements of passing time — couldn’t discern differences of a few thousand years. 

Instead of carbon, Pike and João Zilhão’s team calibrated their molecular clocks by studying mineral deposits that form naturally on cave surfaces, including paintings. The thicker the deposits, the older the painting. And as the reseachers describe in a June 14 Science paper, some of the paintings are very old indeed.

 “What’s really exciting about this possibility,” said Pike, “is that anyone, because it’s open to the public, could walk into El Castillo cave and see a Neanderthal hand on the wall.”

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Stone Age Artist Studio May Go Back 100,000 Years

Abalone shells and stone utensils were used to mix ochre.

Archaeologists have uncovered a 100,000-year-old “studio” in South Africa in which early humans apparently mixed some of the first known paint. Dwellers of the cave used stones for pounding and grinding colorful dirt enriched with a kind of iron oxide to a powder, known as ocher.

Based on artifacts in the cave, the artists then blended the ocher with the fat of mammal-bone marrow and a dash of charcoal. Traces of ocher were left on the tools, and samples of the reddish compound were collected in large abalone shells, where the paint was liquefied, stirred and scooped out with a bone spatula, according to the New York Times.

Archaeologists said that in the workshop remains they were seeing the earliest example yet of how emergent Homo sapiens processed ocher, one of the species’ first pigments in wide use, its red color apparently rich in symbolic significance. The early humans may have applied the concoction to their skin for protection or simply decoration, experts suggested. Perhaps it was their way of making social and artistic statements on their bodies or their artifacts. 

 The discovery reaches back to when modern Homo sapiens were known to have started using paint. Previously, no workshop older than 60,000 years had come to light, and the earliest cave and rock art began appearing about 40,000 years ago.

The well-known animal depictions of Cro-Magnon artists in the caves of Europe would come even later, the Times stated. The animals on the walls of Lascaux in France, for example, were painted some 17,000 years ago.

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Bear's DNA May Settle Cave Art Dispute

A small section of art in the Chauvet Cave.

Researchers have turned to the DNA of Europe’s long-extinct cave bear to solve controversy surrounding the age of the spectacular art in the Chauvet Cave of southeastern France.

Following its discovery in 1994, radiocarbon dating suggested the cave’s images were around 30,000 years old ~ nearly twice as old as the Lascaux cave art in southwestern France. The archaeological world rapidly was polarized, with many agreeing with the 30,000-year-old date, while other archaeologists said the dating was seriously flawed.

According to New Scientist:

To try to settle the controversy, Jean-Marc Elalouf of the Institute of Biology and Technology in Saclay, France, and his team have turned to the remains of cave bears. Along with mammoths and other huge mammals, cave bears (Ursus spelaeus) dominated the European landscape until the end of the last ice age.

The Chauvet cave contains several depictions of cave bears, and Elalouf argues that these must have been painted while the bears still thrived in the area. To pin down when the bears disappeared, his team collected 38 samples of cave bear remains in the Chauvet cave and analyzed their mitochondrial DNA.

They found that almost all the samples were genetically similar, suggesting the cave bear population was small, isolated and therefore vulnerable. Radiocarbon dating showed the samples were all between 37,000 and 29,000 years old, hinting that by the end of that period they were extinct, at least locally.

Martina Pacher of the Commission of Quaternary Research in Vienna, says cave bears became extinct at least 24,000 years ago. "So the results at Chauvet are not surprising, and I agree with their conclusions," she says.

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Research Shows More Women Cave Artists

Painting from Pech-Merle in France showing several hand prints.

Much more Stone Age cave art seems to be the creation of women artists than previously thought, according to new research.

An American archaeologist has measured outlined handprints found on cave walls in France and Spain ~ some dating back 28,000 years ~ and has shown that the relative lengths of fingers fit the proportions of female hands better than those of males.

“I had access to lots of people of European descent who were willing to let me scan their hands as reference data,” says Dean Snow, of Pennsylvania State University.

According to the London Times:

By matching their hand profiles against photographs of paint-outlined hands from the caves of El Castillo and Gargas, in northern Spain, and Pech-Merle in the Dordogne region of France, “even a superficial examination of published photos suggested to me that there were lots of female hands there."

The handprints were created by placing the palm, or possibly the back, of the hand against the cave wall, taking a mouthful of powdered pigment ~ usually red ochre ~ and blowing it, as Michel Lorblanchet showed many years ago. Sometimes a finger appears to be missing. Such absences have been attributed to mutilation, but bending the finger back while spraying the hand with the pigment powder would give the same effect.

Snow believes that many of these hand prints are those of women. In two examples from Castillo, about 28,000 years old, “The very long ring finger on one example is a dead giveaway for male hands,” he said. “The other has a long index finger and a short little finger — thus very feminine.”

Click here for the London Times article.