El Castillo Cave

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Access to the cave in April 2008
Rock painting in the El Castillo cave
Find from Magdalenian with an engraved deer

The Cueva de El Castillo cave near Puente Viesgo in Cantabria , Spain, is famous for its 40,000 year old cave paintings . It belongs to the Monte Castillo cave complex .

Dating

The paintings are assigned to the earliest Upper Palaeolithic and are recognized as probably the oldest works of art in Europe. They are older than those of the Chauvet cave and date back to before the Aurignacia of Aquitaine or other parts of Central and Western Europe. There are also depictions of animals, but they are more recent.

history

The entrance was discovered in 1903 by Hermilio Alcalde del Río (1866–1947), and the excavation began shortly afterwards. The German Hugo Obermaier also took part in several excavation campaigns from 1909. In 2008, the cave was recognized by UNESCO as part of the Paleolithic cave paintings in northern Spain .

Technology and authorship

The 25 or so handprints discovered in the cave look like graffiti . They were created by placing a hand on the cave wall and blowing pigment over it. Even after the re-dating, it is considered likely that the art came from modern humans, but the last Neanderthals cannot be ruled out as authors either. For a long time, science assumed that men had artistically implemented their hunting experiences in the paintings, but there was no evidence for this. But the archaeologist Dean Snow from Pennsylvania State University analyzed handprints from eight French and Spanish Stone Age caves, including the El Castillo Cave, and found that around three quarters of all colored hands are from women, and there are also numerous handprints from children and adolescents .

See also

Web links

Commons : Cuevas del Monte Castillo  - Collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Victoria Cabrera Valdes, James L. Bischoff: Accelerator 14 C dates for early upper paleolithic (basal Aurignacian) at El Castillo Cave (Spain). In: Journal of Archaeological Science 16, No. 6, 1989, pp. 577-584, doi: 10.1016 / 0305-4403 (89) 90023-X .
  2. ↑ Thorwald Ewe: image of science online - booklet archive. (No longer available online.) In: bildderwissenschaft.de. July 2014, archived from the original on April 8, 2018 ; accessed on April 8, 2018 . Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.bildderwissenschaft.de


Coordinates: 43 ° 17 ′ 32 "  N , 3 ° 57 ′ 56"  W.