Bad luck Merle
Pech Merle is a stalactite cave with Upper Palaeolithic cave paintings . It is located in the southwest of France in the municipality of Cabrerets near the city of Cahors and is part of the Franco-Cantabrian cave art complex .
To protect the rock carvings from the breath of the visitors, only 700 visitors can visit the cave each day. Photography in the cave is prohibited.
geography
The stalactite cave is located in the municipality of Cabrerets in the Lot department . The Geographical coordinates are: 44 ° 30 '29 " N , 1 ° 38' 40" O . The entrance is 280 m above sea level between the Sagne and Célé rivers .
History of the cave paintings
The age of the oldest drawings is dated to around 20,000 years. For a long time, science assumed that men had artistically implemented their hunting experiences in the paintings, but there was no evidence for this. The archaeologist Dean Snow from Pennsylvania State University analyzed handprints from eight French and Spanish Stone Age caves, including the cave of Pech Merle, and found that around three quarters of all colored hands are from women, and there are also numerous handprints from children and young people.
exploration
The exploration of the cave began in 1914. In 1922 the drawings were discovered by the students André David and Henri Dutertre. In 1923 the current entrance to the cave was dug.
The cave
The cave is divided into several halls and viewing points.
Room of the broken column and the black frieze
Here lies a broken column and you can see the movement of a limestone slab. In this room you can find drawings of horses, bison and mammoths. The age of the drawings is around 16,000 and 20,000 years. The drawings are made with charcoal.
Rock Art Room
A 40 m wide gallery can be seen in this hall. Horses, bison, fish and hand negatives are shown . That means, the hands were placed on the wall and red paint ( red chalk ) was blown around with a blowpipe . A study in 2011 showed that there were indeed horses with tiger spotting during the Gravettian period , which could correspond to the spotted horses of Pech Merle in their phenotype .
In this room, in water that is oversaturated with calcium carbonate , residues from the flowing water have formed a top and many pearls.
Hieroglyphics ceiling
Here there is a vault with a size of 40 m. The drawings show mammoths and female body parts.
Bison women
There are eight silhouettes of women in this area. Next to it you can see stylized bison.
Footprints
In a dried out part of the cave there are about 12,000 year old footprints of a child.
Bear gallery
The name is derived from scratch marks left by cave bears.
Combel gallery
In the middle of the gallery there is an oak root that is over 12 m long and extends vertically from the ceiling to the floor.
literature
- Guide to the visit to the grotto of PECH-MERLE Cabrerets. Lot, Castelet publishing house.
Individual evidence
- ↑ Hubert Filser: Strong women. Common ideas about the Stone Age are supposed to justify today's gender roles. The 'weaker sex' gathered berries, while the brave guys did heroic deeds on the hunt. The problem with that: it's not true. Women were once good hunters and as strong as men. In: Süddeutsche Zeitung, No. 28, 3./4. February 2018, p. 34.
- ↑ 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.
- ↑ Melanie Pruvost et al .: Genotypes of predomestic horses match phenotypes painted in Paleolithic works of cave art. PNAS , 108, 2011, p. 18626, doi : 10.1073 / pnas.1108982108 .
