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(Photo: Andalucia) Deep inside a cave called Cueva de Ardales in southern Spain are over 1,000 works of ancient art. An earthquake opened the cave up to exploration in 1821, allowing modern humans to gaze upon the animals, handprints, and humans painted on the walls for the first time in thousands of years. Despite the cave’s relatively newfound accessibility, however, archaeologists have had trouble figuring out who exactly was responsible for the art and when each work was added.

Now radiometric data garnered from excavated samples have offered researchers the clues necessary to piece together the chronology of the cavernous “art studio.”  In 2011, a Spanish-German research team began excavating works of art from the cave’s entrance, where a majority of the studio’s non-figurative red paintings were found. By 2018 they had 50 samples on which to perform accelerator mass spectrometry (AMS) dating, a modern radiocarbon dating method known to most efficiently measure an artifact’s half-life. 

Charcoal-capped stalagmites imply that some humans created DIY stationary lamps to see what they were painting. (Photo: José Ramos-Muñoz et al/PLoS One)

The results of the AMS procedures revealed that Cueva de Ardales was occupied sporadically, resulting in artistic contribution from humans across two separate points in history. The 58,000-year-old cave was first enjoyed by Neanderthals during the Middle Paleolithic era, when the use of fire by early humans was finally becoming common. “Anatomically modern” humans  then rediscovered the cave during the Neolithic period, when humans first began taking up farming. The archaologists, whose research was published this week in the journal PLoS One, emphasize that the cave was not used as a campsite, but rather “visited to carry out non-domestic tasks, such as the production of rock art or the burial of the dead.” 

While those non-figurative paintings were found toward the cave’s entrance, paintings depicting humans and animals were found deeper inside, where natural light wouldn’t have illuminated the artists’ stone canvases. The humans responsible for these works appear to have used some of the cave’s stalagmites as stationary lamps, according to charcoal caps found on some of the stalagmites deep within the cave.  

The archaeologists estimate that there’s more art to be discovered, thanks to parts of the cave left completely untouched by explorers over the last several hundred years. 

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