While some are etched and others shaded with white mondmilch, a type of limestone precipitate, the majority are clay-based. One of the most notable parts of this new discovery is the way the drawings were created. The researchers believe it is the Paleolithic cave with the greatest number of motifs discovered in Europe since 2015. “The cave is arguably the ‘most important’ Paleolithic rock art site ever discovered on the eastern coast of the Iberian Peninsula, the researchers said,” Newsweek’s Aristos Georgiou writes. Many of the paintings were made with clay, including this horse's head. Among the motifs, or drawings, are at least 19 confirmed animal representations, including hinds, horses, aurochs and deer. The team dated the drawings to the Paleolithic Period by examining weathering on the drawings and claw marks from a cave bear that later became extinct. Inside, the archaeologists documented more than 100 drawings and engravings, which they believe are at least 24,000 years old, according to the study published last week in Antiquity. “Once we began the proper systematic survey, we realized we were facing a major cave art site, like the ones that can be found elsewhere in Cantabrian Spain, southern France or Andalusia, but that totally lack in this territory,” Aitor Ruiz-Redondo, an archaeologist at the University of Southampton and the University of Zaragoza and an author of a new study about the find, says in a statement. The painted head of an auroch, an extinct wild bull, was the first painting archaeologists discovered in the cave. However, they didn’t realize just how significant the newly discovered cave art was until they returned to fully document it.
While Spain has the largest number of Paleolithic cave art sites, most are concentrated in the country’s northern region, while few have been documented in Eastern Iberia.
Two years ago, when a team of archaeologists spotted a painting of an extinct wild bull called an auroch on the wall of a cave in Spain’s Cova Dones, located in Millares, near Valencia, they knew it was important.
0 kommentar(er)
