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Carved outline of a prehistoric deer or reindeer in the Agneux II cave, Rully, Saone-et-Loire, France.
Credit: Christian Hoyer, Floss Working Group, University of Tübingen
For urban graffiti artists, their work is sometimes on display. And ice age cave art suffered a similar fate, experts have discovered.
Archaeologists suspected that two caves called Agneux Caves and located in eastern France. The researchers had strong suspicions that the art was there, but the cave walls were so covered with layers of more-recent graffiti (from the 16th to 19th centuries) that the ancient art had been hidden for centuries, representatives of the University of Tübingen in Germany reported yesterday (Nov. 14) in a statement.
Scientists with the university and researchers from Spain recently used scanning technology to peer the graffiti layers, reconstructing prehistoric images of a horse and a deer buried underneath. [In Photos: The World’s Oldest Cave Art]
The graffiti covering the cave walls was mostly inscriptions of names and dates with a few figurative pictures, research team leader Harald Floss, Tübingen University professor of early prehistory and quaternary ecology, told Live Science in an email. Floss said, "The cellars are in a picturesque part of the countryside with spectacular views, many people have visited the location over time – and plenty of them left in the cellar," Floss said.
For 150 years, archaeologists have explored France's southern Burgundy region and found abundant remnants of Paleolithic culture – the earliest period of human cultural development. Because there are many Paleolithic sites in this part of France, archaeologists have long thought that there must be cave art in the Saone-et-Loire district, according to Floss.
Painted or engraved wineries are found in every single dense palaeolithic region of Europe, "Floss said. However, the deer and horse paintings are the first examples of cave art created by Paleolithic humans, university representatives said in the statement.
After scans, the scientists reconstructed the artwork with image-processing software. Then, the researchers used carbon-14 dating to charcoal in the cave and in the art to reveal the age of the paintings. Carbon-14, carbon isotope, breaks down over time. By examining how much of the isotope in an object has decayed, scientists can calculate how old the object is; in this case, the art was found to be 12,000 years old.
The region in France where archaeologists discovered the cave art is significant, because it represents a region where Neanderthals. Evidence uncovered there could offer intriguing clues about human-Neanderthal interactions, Floss said.
Following the scientists' analysis of the paintings, French authorities inspected the caves and confirmed their archaeological significance for signs of early humans, according to the statement. The researchers said they are planning further investigations of the site.
The findings were published in August in the book "Palaeolithic Rock and Art Cave in Central Europe?" (Verlag Marie Leidorf, 2018).
Originally published we Live Science.
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