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Researchers from Durham University have decoded the meaning of markings found in Ice Age drawings, providing evidence of early writing at least 20,000 years ago.The team were studying cave art, found in at least 400 European caves such as Lascaux, Chauvet and Altamira, which contains a series of lines and dots found alongside drawings of animals...The team has revealed that the lines and dots indicate the mating and birthing seasons of animals. A "Y" sign formed by adding a diverging line to another has also been determined to mean "giving birth".By using the birth cycles of equivalent animals today as...

Cave paintings of the Spanish Altamira Cave and the French Lascaux Cave, to the Hurrian Hymns from "Music of the Ancient Sumerians, Egyptians, and Greeks." They're around 17,000 years old.

Long thought by many as possible abstract or symbolic expressions as opposed to representations of real animals, the famous paleolithic horse paintings found in caves such as Lascaux and Chauvet in France likely reflect what the prehistoric humans actually saw in their natural environment, suggests researchers who conducted a recent DNA study. To reach this conclusion, scientists constituting an international team of researchers in the UK, Germany, USA, Spain, Russia and Mexico genotyped and analyzed nine coat-color types in 31 pre-domestic (wild) horses dating as far back as 35,000 years ago from bone specimens in 15 different locations spread across...

Link only: An 'orse, of course

The painted caves of Lascaux in the Dordogne region of France are one of the most famed monuments of Ice Age art. Dating back about 17,000 years, the great Hall of the Bulls and its adjacent chambers proved so popular with visitors that a generation ago the cave had to be closed to save the paintings from encroaching mould. A replica, Lascaux II, was built nearby and has proved equally popular. One thing that strikes the visitor is the exuberance of the compositions, with hundreds of animals, including bison, horses and deer, parading along the walls and ceilings, often overlapping....

The survival of the most important cave paintings in the world is in doubt because of a severe fungal infection that spread after an air-circulation system was installed to protect them, archaeologists say. The 17,000-year-old paintings known as “the Sistine Chapel of pre-history” - the Lascaux cave in the Dordogne region of southwest France - are being damaged by black spots that are spreading at an alarming rate. Fragments of the cave walls have broken off and some colour tones are fading. Now Unesco is sending a delegation of specialists to the cave to determine whether it should be placed...

Unprecedented Ice Age Cave Art Discovered in U.K. John Pickrell in England for National Geographic News August 18, 2004 Vivid frescoes of stampeding bulls, horses, and other animals drawn by Stone Age artisans grace the walls of many European caves. The most spectacular examples are found in Altimera in Spain and Lascaux and Chauvet in France. For many years the total lack of cave art in Britain dating to the same period perplexed researchers. Britain was inhabited, after all. And throughout the Ice Age, it was linked to mainland Europe by a land bridge. Last year researchers discovered a handful...

<p>Cave paintings are among man's earliest and most precious recorded creations, and those in Lascaux, near Montignac in the Dordogne region of France, are among the most celebrated and admired of their kind. Dating back some 17,000 years, they feature over 1,500 pictures of animals, many of unique beauty and dynamism.</p>