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For 12 years, visitors wanting to see Spain's prized prehistoric Altamira cave paintings have had to settle for a replica in a museum a few hundred feet away. But from Thursday, small groups of visitors will again be allowed in the cave, which has been described as the Sistine Chapel of paleolithic art, as part of an experiment to determine whether the paintings can support the presence of sightseers. The vast cavern complex, in the Cantabria region of northern Spain, was made a World Heritage Site by Unesco in 1985. It is covered in paintings dated to between 14,000 and...

Some of the oldest art in the United States maps humanity's place in the cosmos, as aligned with an ancient religion. A team of scientists has uncovered a series of engravings and drawings strategically placed in open air and within caves by prehistoric groups of Native American settlers that depict their cosmological understanding of the world around them. "The subject matter of this artwork, what they were drawing pictures of, we knew all along was mythological, cosmological," Jan Simek, an archaeologist at the University of Tennessee said. "They draw pictures of bird men that are important characters in their origin...

Stone Age artists were painting red disks, handprints, clublike symbols and geometric patterns on European cave walls long before previously thought, in some cases more than 40,000 years ago, scientists reported Thursday, after completing more reliable dating tests that raised a possibility that Neanderthals were the artists. A more likely situation, the researchers said, is that the art -- 50 samples from 11 caves in northwestern Spain-- was created by anatomically modern humans fairly soon after their arrival in Europe. The findings seem to put an exclamation point to a run of recent discoveries: direct evidence from fossils that Homo...

The famous paintings on the walls of caves in Europe mark the beginning of figurative art and a great leap forward for human culture. But now a novel method of determining the age of some of those cave paintings questions their provenance. Not that they're fakes — only that it might not have been modern humans who made them. The first European cave paintings are thought to have been made over 30,000 years ago. Most depict animals and hunters. Some of the eeriest are stencils of human hands, apparently made by blowing a spray of pigment over a hand held...

Archaeologists say red disk that is more than 40,000 years old could have been painted by Neanderthals. [Snip... Photos at link] It’s no Mona Lisa, but a smudged red disk in northern Spain has been crowned the world’s earliest cave painting. Dated to more than 40,800 years ago, the shape was painted by some of the first modern humans to reach the Iberian Peninsula — or it may have been done by Neanderthals, residents of the Iberian peninsula for more than 200,000 years. “There is a very good chance that this is Neanderthal,” says Alistair Pike, an archaeological scientist at...

In 1940, a group of teenagers discovered the paintings of bison, bulls and horses adorning the walls of France's Lascaux Cave. Roughly 17,000 years old, the paintings are Europe's most famous cave art, but hardly the oldest. This week archaeologists announced finding in another cave in France art dating to about 37,000 years ago, making it a candidate for Europe's most ancient artwork. Here's a look at the new discovery and the other top contenders for the title of Europe's oldest work of art. Nerja Caves (possibly about 43,000 years ago)... by Neanderthals, the [humans] that lived in this part...

In 2009, a ground-breaking study by Genevieve von Petzinger revealed that dots, lines and other geometric signs found in prehistoric European caves may be the precursor to an ancient system of written communication dating back nearly 30,000 years. Von Petzinger, with University of Victoria anthropology professor April Nowell, compiled the markings from 146 different sites in Ice Age France, making it possible to compare the signs on a larger scale than had ever previously been attempted. What made her research ‘new’ was that she was able to use a whole range of modern technology to compare inventories and digital images...

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...

Research on Dordogne cave art shows children learned to finger-paint in palaeolithic age, approximately 13,000 years ago -- Archaeologists at one of the most famous prehistoric decorated caves in France, the complex of caverns at Rouffignac in the Dordogne known as the Cave of a Hundred Mammoths, have discovered that children were actively helped to express themselves through finger fluting – running fingers over soft red clay to produce decorative crisscrossing lines, zig-zags and swirls. The stunning drawings, including 158 depictions of mammoths, 28 bisons, 15 horses, 12 goats, 10 woolly rhinoceroses, four human figures and one bear, form just...

Recent discovery of a stylized reindeer engraving in a South Wales by Dr George Nash from the Department of Archaeology and Anthropology, University of Bristol, now has been scientifically dated. The date of the flowstone that covers the head of the reindeer is 12,572 +/- 659 years Before Present, and the rock-art below may be much earlier. It is now confirmed that the carved reindeer is one of Britain's earliest examples of engraved figurative rock art. Dr Nash discovered the faint engraving while visiting the Gower Peninsula caves near Swansea in September 2010 with students and members of the Clifton...

In a film that blends paleontological wonders with existential pondering, Cave of Forgotten Dreams asks the question, "What constitutes humanness?" German director Werner Herzog creeps deep into Chauvet Cave in southern France, where researchers say they have found the earliest known cave paintings. The charcoal paintings etched on the curved walls of the cave—some say from 32,000 B.C., others say 10,000 B.C.—look as though someone scratched them there last week. A landslide sealed the cave thousands of years ago, creating a perfectly preserved time capsule until explorers discovered it in 1994. Only a few scientists are allowed inside, and Herzog...

Archaeologists have discovered fragments of one of the world's oldest sculptures, a lion-faced figurine estimated at 32,000 years old, from the dirt floor of a cave in southern Germany. The ivory figure, along with a tiny figurine known as the Venus of Hohle Fels, marks the foundation of human artistry. Both were created by a Stone Age European culture that historians call Aurignacian. The Aurignacians appear to have been the first modern humans, with handicrafts, social customs and beliefs. They hunted reindeer, woolly rhinoceros, mammoths and other animals. The Lion-Man sculpture, gradually re-assembled in workshops over decades after the fragments...

Exploring a gorge in south-east France in 1994 for prehistoric artefacts, Jean-Marie Chauvet hit the jackpot. After squeezing through a narrow passage, he found himself in a hidden cavern, the walls of which were covered with paintings of animals. But dating the beautiful images - which featured in Werner Herzog's recent documentary film Cave of Forgotten Dreams - has led to an ugly spat between archaeologists. Could the bones of cave bears settle the debate? Within a year of Chauvet's discovery, radiocarbon dating suggested the images were between 30,000 and 32,000 years old, making them almost twice the age of...

There's a cave in France where no humans have been in 26,000 years. The walls are full of fantastic, perfectly-preserved paintings of animals, ending in a chamber full of monsters 1312-feet underground, where CO2 and radon gas concentrations provoke hallucinations. It's called the the Chauvet-Pont-d'Arc Cave, a really weird and mysterious place. The walls contain hundreds of animals—like the typical Paleolithic horses and bisons—but some of them are not supposed to be there, like lions, panthers, rhinos and hyenas. A few are not even supposed to exist, like weird butterflyish animals or chimerical figures half bison half woman. These may...

Scientists say an Aboriginal rock art depiction of an extinct giant bird could be Australia's oldest painting. The red ochre painting, which depicts two emu-like birds with their necks outstretched, could date back to the earliest days of settlement on the continent. It was rediscovered at the centre of the Arnhem Land plateau about two years ago, but archaeologists first visited the site a fortnight ago. A palaeontologist has confirmed the animals depicted are the megafauna species Genyornis. Archaeologist Ben Gunn said the giant birds became extinct more than 40,000 years ago. "The details on this painting indicate that it...

This statement isn't new, but for years anthropologists, archaeologists and historians of art understood these artistic manifestations as purely aesthetic and decorative motives. Eduardo Palacio-Pérez, researcher at the University of Cantabria (UC), now reveals the origins of a theory that remains nowadays/lasts into our days. "This theory is does not originate with the prehistorians, in other words, those who started to develop the idea that the art of primitive peoples was linked with beliefs of a symbolic-religious nature were the anthropologists"... This idea appeared at the end of the XIX century and the beginning of the XX century. Up until...

Inanke's prehistoric paintings are a celebration of life The trail to the great cave of Inanke in southern Zimbabwe begins confidently with arrows painted on bare patches of granite and soon vanishes into four miles of often pathless wandering through fields of shoulder-high grass, dense scrub forests and formidable thorn bushes. Without the direction of our guide, the archaeologist Paul Hubbard, our group would never have found this cave containing some of the most magnificent prehistoric paintings in the world. But reach the approximately 30-foot-long frieze of intricately varied paintings and you will find it free of the man-made barriers,...

MUMBAI: A group of naturalists from Amravati districts has discovered a set of 17 unique cave paintings in the nature-rich Satpura range of Madhya Pradesh – which opens up new avenues of research as this art form are believed to be of Paleolithic period. The group call themselves, ‘Hope’, and has been working since the last six years on this project. The group include scientist Dr V T Ingole, wildlife writer PS Hirurkar, Padmakar Lad, Shirishkumar Patil, Dnyaneswar Damahe and Manohar Khode. They are a group of nature and bird lovers, and luckily chanced upon these unique paintings. Ingole said...

Inside France's 25,000-year-old Pech Merle cave, hand stencils surround the famed "Spotted Horses" mural. For about as long as humans have created works of art, they've also left behind handprints. People began stenciling, painting, or chipping imprints of their hands onto rock walls at least 30,000 years ago. Until recently, most scientists assumed these prehistoric handprints were male. But "even a superficial examination of published photos suggested to me that there were lots of female hands there," Pennsylvania State University archaeologist Dean Snow said of European cave art. By measuring and analyzing the Pech Merle hand stencils, Snow found that...

Modern Australia lacks big land predators, but until about 30,000 years ago, the continent was ruled by Thylacoleo carnifex, the marsupial "lion." Several well-preserved skeletons of the leopard-size beast have been found. Now, a newly discovered cave painting offers a glimpse of the animal's external appearance. In June 2008, Tim Willing, a naturalist and tour guide, photographed an ancient painting on a rockshelter wall near the shore of northwestern Australia. Kim Akerman, an independent anthropologist based in Tasmania, says the painting unmistakably depicts a marsupial lion. It shows the requisite catlike muzzle, large forelimbs, and heavily clawed front paws. And...