U-Series Dating of Paleolithic Art in 11 Caves in Spain

Abstract

Paleolithic cave art is an exceptional archive of early human symbolic behavior, but because obtaining reliable dates has been difficult, its chronology is still poorly understood after more than a century of study. We present uranium-series disequilibrium dates of calcite deposits overlying or underlying art found in 11 caves, including the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) World Heritage sites of Altamira, El Castillo, and Tito Bustillo, Spain. The results demonstrate that the tradition of decorating caves extends back at least to the Early Aurignacian period, with minimum ages of 40.8 thousand years for a red disk, 37.3 thousand years for a hand stencil, and 35.6 thousand years for a claviform-like symbol. These minimum ages reveal either that cave art was a part of the cultural repertoire of the first anatomically modern humans in Europe or that perhaps Neandertals also engaged in painting caves.

Neandertal-Modern Human Contact in Western Eurasia: Issues of Dating, Taxonomy, and Cultural Associations

“…For the time being, they serve to illustrate the "Brave New World" that opens to Paleoanthropology if it dares to remove the Human Revolution eye-band that, as also argued by McBrearty and Brooks ( 2000 ) for the African record for so long blinded scholars to the evidence concerning the behavioral "modernity" of anatomically "archaic" humans. Hopefully, what the last 15 years of developments in the study of the emergence of the Upper Paleolithic and modern humans will have taught us is that the transformations we see in the archeological and human paleontological Pike et al ( 2012 ) records of that time have deep roots in the preceding Middle Paleolithic and its non-"modern" populations.…”

“…In the context of these chronological patterns, it is useful to elaborate on the potential implications of the cave art dating results recently obtained by Pike et al ( 2012 ) with the U-series method. That Neandertals are likely to be the makers of the red disks from the Panel of Hands at El Castillo (Fig.…”

“…Among the latter is the use in body ornamentation of painted/perforated marine shells, large raptor feathers, and mineral pigments modifi ed as crayons or processed for the preparation of complex cosmetic recipes (Soressi and d'Errico 2007 ;Zilhão et al 2010a ;Peresani et al 2011 ;Morin and Laroulandie 2012 ;Finlayson et al 2012 ). It is also quite possible that Neandertals were the makers of the earliest known cave art, as suggested by the minimum age of 41.4 ± 0.6 ka (95.4 % probability interval) provided by U-series dating of calcite accretions covering geometric signs and hand stencils at the Spanish site of El Castillo (Cantabria; Pike et al 2012 ).…”

In situ Raman characterization of minerals and degradation processes in a variety of cultural and geological heritage sites

“…8). The majority of the spectra flagged the presence of calcite, which could be attributed either to calcite Raman signals from the substrate limestone bedrock or to secondary calcite coatings more recently deposited on the ocher pigments, which has been used to date these paintings in recent studies [41].…”

The archaeology of western Arnhem Land’s rock art

“…Refinements in U/Th methods have taken place in recent years (e.g. TIMS U/ 230 Th), giving rise to MC-ICPMS (multicollector-inductively coupled plasma mass spectrometry) U/ 230 Th dating (Aubert et al 2014;Fontugne et al 2013;Pike et al 2012).…”