How many years ago were the cave paintings of Coba in Spain completed? | History

Aitor Luis Redondo, an archaeologist and senior lecturer at the University of Zaragoza in Spain, said collections of Paleolithic art are rarely discovered, with only about 400 such sites found worldwide. He says he hasn’t. But to come across more than 100 prehistoric motifs, created over 24,000 years ago using unorthodox methods and preserved in a cave by chemical luck, is nothing short of extraordinary.

The cave in question, Coba Dones, is located on Spain’s east coast near Valencia, but most of the country’s ancient art, including Altamira’s famous prehistoric cave paintings, is in northern Spain. Coba Dones, first explored by Luis Redondo and his colleagues in 2021, is home to at least 110 paintings, drawings, and sculptures. Many of the motifs depict animals such as female red deer, wild horses, and extinct cows.

Unlike other Paleolithic paintings, which are usually made in ocher or manganese, most of the Coba Dawns paintings are done in clay and preserved through chemistry.

Luis Redondo said Coba Dones is a karst cave whose walls and standing water are rich in calcium carbonate, a natural paint preservative. Early humans probably scooped red clay from cave floors and walls and mixed it with the water beneath their feet. They were creating mineral-enhanced paints, intentionally or not. Then, over thousands of years, the water that flowed into the cave deposited a layer of calcium carbonate over their works, sealing it into the walls that allowed Luis Redondo to discover them centuries later.

Determining the age of cave paintings is a delicate task. Luis Redondo and his team are awaiting a complete laboratory analysis of the Coba Dones motif (including radiometric dating of the cortical mineral coating), but until then, several logical approaches provides some clarity. First, dating of other Paleolithic sites shows that some of the motifs were painted in a style typical of the period between about 21,000 and 40,000 years ago, Ruiz-Redondo said. . Secondly, one of his drawings was smudged in an obvious way. “It was covered in bear scratches,” Luis Redondo said. The mark was made by the extinct cave bear 24,000 years ago, and its placement led the researchers to believe that the motif predates the extinction of bears.

“There has always been a romantic element to archeology,” says Luis Redondo. Especially when it comes to painting, no one has seen this horse for thousands and thousands of years. ” until now.