75,000-year-old Neanderthal engravings identified in France

2023-06-22 11:55:00

According to the dating carried out by the researchers, who published their discovery on Wednesday in the American journal PLOS One, these exceptional engravings date back “probably” to 75,000 years ago, a time when our ancestors Homo sapiens were not yet, until proven otherwise. settled in Western Europe. The Roche-Cotard cave was discovered in 1846 on the banks of the Loire, regarding twenty kilometers west of Tours, in central France. But it “remained inaccessible until 1912, when the owner of the land on which it is located cleared the entrance”, clogged here thousands of years ago by silt carried by the Loire, explain in a press release joint CNRS and the University of Rennes, which participated in the study. Excavations had been undertaken in the 1970s but it was not until 2008 that real research work had resumed in the cave of La Roche-Cotard. Mostly traced with the fingers, the engravings “represent non-figurative motifs, some rather simple like finger impacts surrounding a large fossil embedded in the rock or forming long traces covering a large surface, some more elaborate”, details the press release. Research work has made it possible to experimentally reproduce such lines and above all to “confirm their human character”, eliminating any possibility that they are the product of a natural phenomenon or of any animal action. They also “allowed to rule out the possibility that these lines might have been made following the opening of the cavity in 1912”. (Belga)

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