Famous sites in present-day France and Spain, including Lascaux and Altamira, feature stunning geometric designs, handprints, and paintings of Ice Age beasts up to 17 feet in length. Roughly 38,000 years ago, Paleolithic people in Western Europe began braving dark caves to create some of humanity’s earliest art. Now, new experiments are providing important insights on the logistics of creating ancient cave art, and perhaps a glimmer of the intent behind it. As researchers continue to discover engravings and paintings deep underground, they also want to understand how-and why-past people made and viewed the images. Ruiz López/Courtesy Iñaki IntxaurbeĪ technical achievement, yes, but the ancient artists never saw their works in the static, white light of electric bulbs, or via computer screens.
A work in progress as researchers continue to learn more about the artwork, this digital rendering shows some of the engraved figures carved at the Ledge of Horses. They recreated the art in digital form, allowing the modern word to behold it.
#Cavern lost to time torchlight software#
Researchers flooded the chambers with LED lights and took photographs, which they ran through software to detect elements not visible to human eyes. Faded by time, some figures had nearly vanished. In 2015, two scientists rediscovered this masterpiece, now known as the Ledge of Horses, along with dozens of other carvings and paintings in other hard-to-reach corners of Atxurra Cave. The animals’ outlines fluttered and winked in the light thrown by the lamps. At this spot in what’s now northern Spain’s Atxurra Cave, some 12,500 years ago, the artists carved scores of horses, bison, deer, and mountain goats. They set the torches aside, lit stone lamps greased with marrow, and climbed onto a ledge that ran along the wall’s base. Nearly a quarter-mile from the cave entrance, they reached their canvas: a rugged limestone wall, 40 feet long and eight feet above the cave floor.
Their juniper-branch torches cast a warm, flickering light and shed bits of charcoal like bread crumbs along the trail. For 40 minutes they wormed through passages and scrambled over speleothems. Together, they entered the lightless space. A small group of artists, carrying engraving tools, torches, and other supplies, assembled at the base of the towering limestone outcrop, near the mouth of a dark cave.
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