Drawings in the French cave are significantly "old"

The updated data of radiocarbon dating, as well as other facts, allowed scientists to conclude that the rock drawings in the suture-pont d'arc (Chauvet-Pont D'RC) in the southeast of France were much older than previously considered.

The cave near the small town of Valle-pond'ark in Ardennes was opened in December 1994 by Jean-Marie Chauvet, Eliette Brunel and Christian Hillaire. It found more than 400 drawings depicting various animals: cave lions, panther, bears, hyenas, deer, rhinos, horses, bulls, mammoths. There are also several images of human hands made by the method of stencil. The primitive artist pressed his palm against the stone, collected red ocher in his mouth and spit it out onto the wall of the cave so that there was a trace of the palm of his hand. There are also abstract images in the form of lines and points, part of the drawings cannot be interpreted. A hypothesis was recently expressed that there were images of a spewing volcano on the walls of the cave.

It was assumed that most of the drawings on the walls were made about 20 thousand years ago. Now, having studied the pigments containing carbon, scientists suggest that the oldest images were made 36 thousand years ago. In addition, the charcoal detected during the excavations of the floor of the cave showed that it was first populated about 37 millennia ago. In total, the researchers have analyzed more than 250 samples of charcoal, animal bones and even stains of soot on the walls. They came to the conclusion that there were two periods when the cave was inhabited. The first began 37 thousand years ago and ended about 33.5 thousand years ago. The second took the period from 31 to 28 thousand years ago. Both periods ended when strong rockfalls partially blocked the entrance to the cave. Finally, the cave was cut off from the outside world somewhere between 23.5 and 21 thousand years ago after another rockfall. It was this that ensured the inviolability of caves and their safety to the present day.

The results of the study are published in the journal ProChedings of the National Academy of Sciences.