280 Ice Age Carvings Found in Spanish Cave Tourists Walked Past for Decades

Researchers have documented 280 Paleolithic motifs engraved on the walls of Cova de la Font Major, a cave in Catalonia, northeastern Spain, ScienceAlert reported. The figures sat in plain view for decades while cave enthusiasts, treasure hunters and tourists walked past them.

The find matters because Catalonia had been a blank spot for Paleolithic rock art, even though it borders a region known worldwide for its ancient relics. According to the researchers, the cave holds the third-largest known assemblage of ice age cave art in Mediterranean Iberia.

How the carvings went unnoticed

1853: The cave was rediscovered, though the report says people had been in and out of it during various periods of history well before that.
1957: The entrance was cleared, and visitors began passing through its limestone caverns. Over the following decades, ScienceAlert said, some of them even scratched names and dates over the engraved surfaces.
1993: The cave began to be maintained as a kind of underground museum, with access to the chamber that holds the carvings restricted.
2019: Josep Maria Vergès, a researcher at the Catalan Institute of Human Paleoecology and Social Evolution, noticed a series of parallel lines that hinted at a much older human presence.

Vergès and archaeologist Míriam Salas-Altès then documented the motifs in a chamber called the Gatoneres de Cal Palletes. Vergès said thousands of visitors had stood directly in front of the engraved surfaces for more than six decades without realizing the figures were Paleolithic.

What the carvings show

Of the 280 motifs, 55 are animal figures. They include horses, deer, goats, cattle, an auroch and a bear, while several others could not be identified. Other designs are more abstract, such as fence-like rows of upright parallel lines and a composition of intricate looped shapes that looks almost like a kind of writing. The researchers say it is not yet clear how old those loops are.

The quantity is unusual. Salas-Altès said that along the Iberian Mediterranean coast, around 75 percent of known assemblages contain no more than five animal figures, and over 90 percent contain no more than 20.

The age of the art is still a best guess. The team believes it could predate the Magdalenian culture, and it plans to use uranium dating on calcite that formed over one of the animal images.

Why it matters

For archaeologists, the cave shifts the picture of where ice age artists worked. Salas-Altès said northeastern Iberia holds “first-rate Paleolithic rock art sites,” contrary to earlier thinking. She added that the discovery adds a new body of work to the Mediterranean art of western Europe, helping researchers describe a graphic tradition with its own identity, distinct from that of the Franco-Cantabrian region.

The find also shows how fragile such sites can be. The report said the Gatoneres suffered significant damage after 1957 from erosion caused by bodies brushing against the walls, and from graffiti. Vergès and Salas-Altès suspect that many more Paleolithic etchings were lost this way.

The cave's other layers show how long people have used it. Charcoal and a flint-backed bladelet point to a human presence in the Upper Paleolithic. A human femur dated to the late Neolithic suggests one section served as a burial place. A hoard of Bronze Age artifacts stayed sealed inside after a collapse closed the entrance, probably during the Roman period, until 20th-century treasure hunters arrived.

What visitors can see now

Parts of Cova de la Font Major remain open to the public, but the section with the carvings is closed to protect the art from further damage. The research has been published in the journal Antiquity.

Around Prague, based on reporting by ScienceAlert

Cover photo: Jordiferrer / Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 3.0, cropped

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