Researchers discover 'remarkable' 24,000-year-old palaeolithic cave art in Spain

Archaeologists have made a significant discovery of Palaeolithic cave art in "Cova Dones" or "Cueva Dones", a cave site in Spain.

With over 100 ancient paintings and engravings believed to be at least 24,000 years old, this discovery can arguably be considered one of the most important finds on the Eastern Iberian Coast in Europe.

A remarkable find

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The 500-metre-long cave located near Valencia, as per Phys.org, is an often visited site for locals, hikers, and explorers.Despite this, the existence of Palaeolithic paintings remained unnoticed until researchers made this remarkable discovery in June 2021.The findings have been published in the journal 'Antiquity'.

"When we saw the first painted auroch [extinct wild bull], we immediately acknowledged it was important. Although Spain is the country with the largest number of Palaeolithic cave art sites, most of them are concentrated in northern Spain. Eastern Iberia is an area where few of these sites have been documented so far," said Dr Aitor Ruiz-Redondo, Senior Lecturer of Prehistory at the University of Zaragoza and a research affiliate at the University of Southampton.

He added that "the actual 'shock' of realising its significance came long after the first discovery."

"Once we began the proper systematic survey we realised 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."

The discovery

The research team, led by Dr Ruiz-Redondo, Dr Virginia Barciela-González, Senior Lecturer of Prehistory at the University of Alicante, and Dr Ximo Martorell-Briz, an affiliate researcher at the University of Alicante, painstakingly documented more than a hundred motifsin Cova Dones.

As per the research abstract published on the Cambridge website, the team has "identified more than 110 graphic units, including at least 19 zoomorphic representations, located in three different zones of the cave."

The depicted animals include "seven horses, seven hinds (female red deer), two aurochs, a stag, and two indeterminate animals. The rest of the art consists of conventional signs (rectangles, meanders), several panels of ‘macaroni’ (‘flutings’ made with either fingers or tools dragged across a soft surface), isolated lines, and poorly preserved unidentified paintings."

What sets this site apart is not just the quantity of ancient artworks, but also the variety of techniques used in creating them.Remarkably, most of the paintings were created using clay.

These ancient artists would drag their fingers and palms covered with clay on the cave walls, and the humid cave environment allowed the paintings to dry slowly, preserving them over thousands of years.Although clay painting is a known art form in Palaeolithic art, examples of its usage or preservation are rare.

The research is still in its early stages, and there is much more to explore and document within the cave. Scientists predict that further investigationof the caves should uncover more art in the coming years.

(With inputs from agencies)

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