The Oldest Cave Paintings In Europe

The oldest cave paintings in Europe

The oldest cave paintings in Europe have been found in recent years in Spain. These are prehistoric paintings that are around 65,000 years old and that archaeologists have found distributed in three very distant points with each other.

The places of the findings are three caves located in Cantabria, in the province of Malaga and in the urban center of Cáceres. Let’s discover these treasures!

Antiquity of these cave paintings

Until now, in Spain the caves with older cave paintings that had been discovered were in the Basque Country. Specifically in the province of Guipúzcoa, where is the Altxerri cave, whose antiquity dates back to about 39,000 years ago. However, there is a big difference between this Basque Cave and the other three oldest we want to talk about.

Possibly, the main difference is that the caves of the Pasiega in Cantabria, of Ardales in Malaga, and of Maltravieso in Cáceres were painted by Neanderthal. Yes, a kind of homo already extinct, about which scientists have diverse opinions regarding their links with Homo sapiens from which current humanity descends.

A unique dating method

Another important difference is found in the materials used to paint these three caves. They are pigments created with inorganic subjects, which would have been impossible to date thanks to the traditional carbon-14 method.

Therefore, in order to calculate the age of these cave paintings, the uranium dating has been resorted to.

This is a system that would allow to find elements to date something as more than half a million years old.

Now that we know who performed them and how science has been able to make them date, we will turn around these three caves with cave paintings so antiquísima.

Pasiega Cave

The territory of Cantabria is known for various tourist and cultural attractions, beginning with its extraordinary wealth in cave paintings. To her has recently joined the finding of the La Pasiega cave, by whose name we can already deduce that it is in Valle del Río Pas.

It is clear that this cave does not offer a set of the beauty of the famous paintings of Altamira, but it is much larger.: Neither more nor less than about 65,000 years. These painted linear signs are found on the wall of this gallery, which enters more than 100 meters in the bowels of the earth.

Ardales cave

Of this group of three caves with cave paintings, the widest cavity of all is what is in the Cueva de Ardales, in lands of the province of Malaga. It is a cave that lasts for more than a kilometer and that was occupied for centuries and millennia by many groups of prehistoric men.

For that reason, there are paintings that historians place in the Paleolithic and different animals can be identified. However, there are abstract symbols with elongated shapes and also based on curved and elliptical lines. These forms are the oldest of the set.

Maltravieso cave

Usually, cave paintings are found in natural places, and even with difficult accesses. However, that does not happen in the Maltravieso cave, which is in the same urban area of Cáceres, a city that was already declared a World Heritage Site, and now has another element to increase its wealth.

The dating of a negative hand in this cave has been calculated with an age of 66,700 years. A treasure that also made someone from an extinct species like Neanderthals.

In short, a vestige of an incalculable value, and that reflects the evolution of the human being alone. A marvel! Or rather, there are three wonders distributed throughout different places of the Iberian Peninsula!