Spanish Cave Has Been Used For Art And Burials For Over 50,000 Years, According To New Research

New evidence suggests that a cave in the South of Spain has been regularly visited by prehistoric people for at least 50,000 years. The first visitors to the cave were likely Neaderthals, about 65,000 years ago. After that, modern humans used the cave at different points in time to create art and carry out ceremonial tasks.

In 1821, an earthquake uncovered the opening to a forgotten cave near the town of Ardales in the Andalusian province of Málaga. The Cueva de Ardales is decorated with a variety of ancient rock art, but there has been surprisingly little research on the cave since it was rediscovered two hundred years ago.

To better understand when the cave was used, and why, a group of researchers from Spain and Germany carried out excavations in the entrance area of the cave between 2011 and 2018. After analysing the data they collected over the years, they published their results today in a research paper in the journal PLOS One.

The samples they took came from the first 20 meters of the cave’s entrance, where a nineteenth century staircase leads down to the interior areas of the cave. In this area they explored the sediment layers and collected pottery fragments, samples of animal and human remains, textiles, tools and more.

To determine how old these items were, the research team used a combination of methods. Simply looking at which sediment layer something is found in already gives an indication of how long it has been there. But they also used radiocarbon dating to get a better sense of the age of the organic materials they found, such as charcoal remains, bones, or textiles.

They found many ochre samples, corresponding with art being created at this site during the Paleolithic era. The location and position of the human remains they found also suggested that the cave could have been used as a burial site during the Holocene. There wasn’t much to suggest that people lived in these caves, so it seems more likely that the cave was only used occasionally – for example for burials, or to create art – and that people lived elsewhere nearby.

Not everything the research group found was prehistoric. One of the interesting objects they uncovered was a piece of rope that had become completely calcified over the ages. Based on radiocarbon dating and on other samples from this part of the entrance area, it appeared that this rope was likely used in the 16th or 17th century. So, even though the cave entrance was hidden until 1821, there must have been another way in and at least some people knew how to get there!

There is still a lot of information in these caves that hasn’t been explored yet. Only the entrance of the cave was explored in this study and the rock art in this part of the cave is very different from the art found in the rest of the cave. Whereas the further part of the cave has a lot of depictions of animals, the art in the entrance is mostly a collection of abstract red shapes. Because some of these abstract shapes were covered with newer art or calcite deposits, the researchers estimated that some of these paintings were 65,000 years old, making it some of the oldest art found in this part of the world.

Dating rock art is quite difficult, especially for very old samples, so these estimated ages are usually ballpark figures. Archeological findings become more accurate once other researchers find different clues that match with the broad picture of human prehistory in the same part of the world. There are other caves with rock art and other archeological sites in the area that are equally relevant. So as a collection of snapshots of one cave, this study forms a piece of the puzzle of how humans lived in prehistoric Europe.