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There are around 400 caves in France and Spain that contain painted art made between 40,000 and 12,000 years ago. Many of these bear hand prints or paintings created by children between the ages of two and 12. Experts have long wondered why such young children were taken into some of the deepest and darkest caves in Europe on treks that would have been quite treacherous. A new study suggests that children may have played a special role as mediators between the physical and spiritual worlds, according to a statement released by Tel Aviv University. The prevailing hypothesis has been...

Cutting-edge technology has been used to redate the world-famous Schöningen spears that were discovered in the mid-1990s, according to a statement released by the University of York. At the time, experts estimated that 10 wooden weapons were around 400,000 or 300,000 years old, making them among the oldest hunting weapons ever found. However, scientists recently used a dating method known as amino acid geochronology, which analyzes amino acids locked in snail shells buried in sediment layers, to determine that the spears were around 100,000 years younger. This likely means that the weapons were created and wielded by Neanderthals and not...

A 200-year-old South African cave painting made by the region’s first inhabitants, the San people, appears to depict an animal that has been extinct for over 200 million years. A long-bodied animal with downward-turned tusks, the warm-blooded, lizard-like creature called a dicynodont (two-toothed dog) roamed the area before the first dinosaur appeared and died off at the end of the Triassic. If the artwork from the cave’s Horned Serpent panel at La Belle France (Free State Province, South Africa) is of this extinct species, its creation would predate the first known scientific classification of a dicynodont by at least a...

Art imitates life ... maybe.There’s something intriguing, even frightening, about the image of an ancient horned serpent roaming across the land. Thanks to some suggestive fossils and legends of old, talk of such a creature isn’t a new concept. But the recent discovery of 200-year-old rock paintings found in South Africa now has scientists hypothesizing that this ancient creature may have been far more than just a legend. The first formal scientific descriptions of this horned serpent—a supposed member of the dicynodont group—appeared in 1845. Considering the abundance of dicynodont fossils found in the Karoo Basin in South Africa, some...

A team of Brazilian researchers is investigating a cave site featuring ancient paintings in Itatiaia National Park, near the border between Rio de Janeiro and Minas Gerais. The discovery, which could reshape the understanding of early human presence in the region, has drawn the attention of leading archaeologists and cultural preservation agencies. Though the paintings were discovered in 2023 by Andres Conquista, an operational supervisor at the park, the news was kept under wraps to protect the site, which sits along a well-traveled hiking trail. While hiking during a climbing trip, Conquista was drawn to a cluster of blooming red...

The Indus Valley civilization was one of the most advanced in the world for over 500 years. More than 1000 settlements sprawled across 250,000 square miles of what is now Pakistan and northwest India from 2600 BCE to 1900 BCE. It had several large, well-planned cities like Mohenjo-daro, common iconography, and a script no one has been able to understand. Linguists studying the Indus script don't know anything about the underlying language and there's no multilingual Rosetta Stone, but scholars have analyzed its structure for clues and compared it to other scripts. Most Indologists think it's “logo-syllabic” script like Sumerian...

The entrance to the Maszycka Cave in southern Poland (Credit: Darek Bobak) In a nutshell * Scientists found evidence of cannibalism in an 18,000-year-old Polish cave, where at least ten people — including children — were systematically butchered and eaten, likely due to territorial conflicts rather than survival needs * The Magdalenian people who created famous cave art like Lascaux were capable of both sophisticated cultural achievements and extreme violence, challenging our understanding of prehistoric societies * As populations grew after the last Ice Age, competition for resources likely led to violent conflicts between groups, with evidence of similar cannibalism...

We don't yet know if the hump disappeared after childhood. None of the previously discovered mummies had a hump. Image credit: Tiberio via Wikimedia Commons (public domain) For the first time ever, researchers have uncovered the mummified remains of a woolly rhinoceros with a big old hump on the back of its neck. Curiously absent in all other known specimens of the Ice Age megafauna, this fatty bulge attests to the remarkable accuracy of ancient cave paintings depicting rhinos with hunched backs. More than 35,000 years ago, prehistoric artists decorated the walls of the Chauvet Cave in France with stunningly...

An archeological team in Venezuela has discovered 20 rock art sites that date back thousands of years in Canaima National Park, in the southeastern part of the country. While archaeologists have found similar rock art designs elsewhere in South America, the newfound art "represents a new culture previously unknown," José Miguel Pérez-Gómez, an archaeologist and researcher at Simón Bolívar University in Caracas who is leading the team, told Live Science in an email. Some of these designs, which researchers call "pictograms," were drawn in red and depict geometric motifs such as lines of dots, rows of X's, star-shaped patterns and...

This vibrant reminder of the human need to create art was no match for one idiot with a smart phone and a dream. The paintings, washed out by water. © Civil Guard photo. ====================================================================================== Cops are investigating the defacement of a 6,000-year-old cave painting in southern Spain. According to authorities, the ancient evidence of the human drive to create was damaged when a local man poured water on it. Why? He was trying to gussy up the painting to take a photo for his Facebook page. The paintings are located in the Sierra Sur de Jaén mountain in Spain’s Jaén...

Representational art discovered in a cave on Karampuang Hill on the Indonesian island of Sulawesi has been dated to at least 51,200 years ago by a team of researchers led by Adhi Agus Oktaviana of Indonesia's National Research and Innovation Agency, according to a BBC News report. The scientists determined the minimum age of the artwork by dating the fine layers of calcium carbonate that had formed on top of it over the millennia with a technique called laser ablation U-series analysis. The images depict a wild pig with its mouth partly open and three human-like figures. The largest human...

A recent DNA research on the bones of a boy who lived along the shores of Lake Baikal in Siberia shows... that Native Americans share much of their genetic material with Middle Easterners and Europeans...Published in the journal Nature, the study of the genome of the boy, who lived twenty-four thousand years ago, shows that fully one-third of his DNA was from West Eurasian peoples linked to the Middle East and Europe....The study... could help clear up some long-standing mysteries regarding... some genetic singularities.Co-author and ancient DNA specialist Eske Willerslev of the University of Copenhagen states "these results were a...

Spanish experts have found in Paraguay the oldest evidence of the presence of man dating back more than 5,000 years. The find was made during the course of an investigation being conducted into the heritage of the Pai Tavytera Indians. The remnants of ancient man's presence - which were not specified - were found in a hill known as Jasuka Venda by a team from the Altamira Museum, which is responsible for looking after the same-named cave containing the famous Upper Paleolithic cave paintings. The museum will present details of the Paraguay find at the International Congress on Cave Art...

Ancient human faces believed to have been carved into rock up to 2,000 years ago have been revealed in the Amazon.The previously hidden petroglyphs were spotted on a riverbank after an extreme drought last week caused water levels to plummet to their lowest level in more than a century.Most of the engravings on the River Negro – a major tributary of the Amazon – are of facial expressions, some smiling and others looking grim.Several have been seen before but now there are a greater variety it should help to establish the origin of the carvings, experts say.'The engravings are prehistoric,...

The animals painted in ocher in Colombia may include giant ground sloths and other creatures that vanished from the Americas. But some researchers say the art has a more recent origin. At the end of the last ice age, South America was home to strange animals that have since vanished into extinction: giant ground sloths, elephant-like herbivores and an ancient lineage of horses. A new study suggests that we can see these lost creatures in enchanting ocher paintings made by ice age humans on a rocky outcrop in the Colombian Amazon. These dazzling rock art displays at Serranía de la...

This ancient art was made during the late Pleistocene, about 10,000 to 35,000 years ago, and has typically been the purview of art historians and anthropologists, many of whom view Paleolithic art as done by accomplished shaman-artists... Using new forensic techniques on fossil handprints of the artists and examining thousands of images, "I found that all ages and both sexes were making art, not just the senior male shamans," Guthrie said. These included hundreds of prints made as ocher, manganese, or clay negatives and a few positive prints made with pigments or mud applied to hands that were then placed...

In Puerto Rican caves, there are three types of art: petroglyphs (carved into the rock), pyroglyphs (drawn from the burnt remnants of objects), and pictographs, or cave drawings. Acosta-Colon says these pictograph drawings are in organic black material, perfect for radiocarbon dating...The earliest pictographs of abstract, geometrical shapes were dated to ca. 700–400 BCE, coinciding with the Archaic Age...They found that more anthropological-type drawings—with simple shapes of human bodies—were drawn between 200 and 400 CE. "We have gaps of time and that's interesting because we don't know what happened," says Acosta-Colon...The research team also found more detailed human and animal...

The Neolithic period of northern Arabia is known in part from the monumental stone structures and accompanying cave art, as well as the remains of hearths indicating temporary settlement. But there is much we do not know about the character and timing of settlement before the spread of animal pastoralism (c. 6000 BC).Researchers have recently discovered new, enigmatic carvings that shed light on this ancient history.Five panels totaling nine large life-size specimens have so far been identified. The camels have frequently had other camels carved over them or had their features and proportions improved, which suggests the site was used...

Research led by Complutense University, Madrid, has discovered an array of ancient cave paintings hidden among previously described cave art...The researchers revisited La Pasiega cave's rock art using new digital stereoscopic recording methods and identified previously unnoticed animal figures within the cave art. Specifically, they discovered new depictions of horses, deer, and a large bovid (possibly an aurochs) that had not been recognized before.Some figures were previously considered incomplete as if the artist simply gave up on the rendering midway through. Through stereoscopic photography and a better understanding of how natural rock formations were incorporated into the artwork, these incomplete...

İnkaya Cave, located within the borders of Bahadırlı village in the Çan district, was found during the Muğla and Çanakkale Provinces Survey conducted in 2016 under the direction of İsmail Özer, a lecturer at Ankara University, Department of Paleoanthropology...During the excavations carried out last year, the Middle Paleolithic period workshop part of the cave was unearthed... humans from the Middle Paleolithic Period resided in the region for extended periods due to the availability of flint raw material and water resources.“Evidence of the Paleolithic era in Çanakkale was previously limited. Through our research, it became evident that Çanakkale is actually one...