Cueva de Ardales – Rock Art Cave In Spain Was Used By Ancient Humans For More Than 50,000 Years

Conny Waters - AncientPages.com - A cave known as Cueva de Ardales or the so-called Trinidad Grund and located in southern Spain was used by ancient humans as a canvas for artwork.

It is also a burial place for over 50,000 years, according to a new study. It was discovered in 1821 when an earthquake opened the entrance to the cave that remained sealed for 3,500 years.

Cueva de Ardales, Spain. Image credit: University of Barcelona 

Cueva de Ardales, a cave in Málaga, Spain, is famous for containing more than 1,000 paintings and engravings made by prehistoric people, as well as artifacts and human remains.

Since 1823, the cave was opened to national tourism, with some 19th century references to the discovery of fossil human remains. Only in 1918, the famous French prehistorian Henry Breuil recognized the importance of the Cave. He was involved in the study  ofmthe cave art of the Ardales Cave.

However, until today, the nature of human usage of this cave has not been well-understood.

In the study, published June 1, 2022, in the open-access journal PLOS ONE,  José Ramos-Muñoz of the University of Cadiz, Spain, and colleagues present the results of the first excavations in this cave, which shed light on the history of human culture in the Iberian Peninsula.

The site's first occupants were most probably Neanderthals and their occupation of this ancient site is date by researchers to more than 65,000 years ago.

It was confirmed with the help of radiometric dating and analysis of remains and artifacts discovered in  the cave (Cueva de Ardales). It was also confirmed that modern humans arrived to this region later, around 35,000 years ago.

At first, the cave was used sporadically until as recently as the beginning of the Copper Age. The oldest rock art in the cave consists of abstract signs such as dots, finger tips, and hand-stencils created with red pigment, while later artwork depicts figurative paintings such as animals.

There are numerous paintings and engravings. Today, 1,010 pictorial representations of 252 panels or different areas of the cave are known. These areas display 98 representations of animals, 10 human figures and 9 handprints).

In addition to the pictorial representations, the interior of the cave has preserved numerous finds associated with its human use. They are tools carved in flint and some in bone, which were deposited or abandoned in the vicinity of the cave art, and may have been used to engrave some of the figures.

Lithics from the Middle Paleolithic layers of zone 3. A: Quartzite core or heavy duty tool, B: Blade, C: Levallois flake, D: Sidescraper. Credit: Ramos-Muñoz et al., 2022, PLOS ONE, CC-BY 4.0 (creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/)

Cueva de Ardales is a great landmark of Spain and represents  both cultural and heritage legacy from the Paleolithic.

Human remains indicate the use of the cave as a burial place in the Holocene, but evidence of domestic activities is extremely poor, suggesting humans were not living in the cave.

These results confirm the importance of Cueva de Ardales as a site of high symbolic value.

This site provides an incredible history of human activity in Spain, and along with similar sites—there are more than 30 other caves in the region with similar paintings—makes the Iberian Peninsula a key locality for investigating the deep history of European culture.

"Our research presents a well-stratified series of more than 50 radiometric dates in Cueva de Ardales that confirm the antiquity of Paleolithic art from more than 58,000 years ago. It also confirms that the cave was a place of special activities linked to art, as numerous fragments of ochre were discovered in the Middle Paleolithic levels," the authors added.

Written by Conny Waters - AncientPages.com Staff Writer