Paintings are 37,000 years old

AMERICAN anthropologists have now identified cave paintings found in the Abri Castanet in Le Périgord Noir as the oldest in the world.

The research comes just a week after other research pointed to those from the Chauvet Cave in the Ardèche as the oldest.

However while the Chauvet ones are thought to date from around 32,000 years ago, ones identified on pieces of collapsed ceiling in the Abri Castanet site are believed to be about 37,000 years old.

The paintings are on a limestone block found in 2007 in the site, itself discovered in 1911.

It is covered in pictures of animals and geometric designs. A rounded shape thought to represent a vulva was also found.

The cave itself is thought to have been home to a community of up to 300 people from the Aurignacian period, so named from Aurignac in the Haute-Garonne. This period, from about 40,000 to 28,000BC is associated with some of the earliest modern humans in Europe, whose ancestors are thought to have come from Africa around 45,000 years ago, gradually pushing out the Neanderthals.

The pictures, such as one showing two horses in red and black, show that people were sophisticated even at this early period. “The first Aurignacian humans functioned more or less like humans today,” said New York University professor Randall White, one of the authors of the research.

The findings were published in the Annals of the National Academy of Sciences.
Photo: Père Igor/ Creative Commons