280 Ice Age Engravings Found in Spanish Cave Visited for Decades

The engravings are shallow carvings cut into rock, not painted images, which helps explain how they escaped notice. In plain terms: faint scratches on stone are easy to miss unless you know what to look for.

What do the carvings show?

The 280 motifs divide into recognizable animals and abstract patterns.

• 55 animal figures, including horses, deer, goats, cattle, an auroch (an extinct wild ox) and a bear; several others remain unidentified.
• Fence-like rows of upright parallel lines.
• An intricate composition of looped shapes that almost resembles writing, though the researchers don't yet know how old the loops are.

One horse figure uses the natural edge of the rock as its ground line. A bear is shown with its ears in frontal perspective and a slightly open mouth.

The sheer volume sets the site apart. "Along the Iberian Mediterranean facade, from the Pyrenees to Gibraltar, around 75 percent of known assemblages contain no more than five zoomorphic figures, and over 90 percent contain no more than 20," Salas-Altès said. "The sheer quantity of art discovered at the Cova de la Font Major is therefore particularly exceptional."

How old is the art?

That's still an open question, and the researchers are careful about it. Stylistic clues — double Y-shaped limbs and tri-lined heads on some animals — match other pre-Magdalenian cave art, suggesting the engravings could predate the Magdalenian culture of the late ice age. But that's a best guess. The team plans uranium dating, using calcite deposited on one of the animal depictions, to pin down a real age.

The cave itself has a long human history. Before its modern rediscovery in 1853, people came and went across many periods. Charcoal and a flint-backed bladelet point to human presence in the Upper Paleolithic. A human femur dated to the late Neolithic suggests one section served for burial. A collapse, probably during the Roman period, sealed a hoard of Bronze Age artifacts inside until the 20th-century treasure hunters arrived.

What damage has already been done?

Plenty. From 1957 until access to the Gatoneres was restricted in 1993, bodies brushing against the walls caused erosion, and visitors left graffiti — sometimes right on top of the ancient figures. The cave has operated as a subterranean museum since 1993. Vergès and Salas-Altès suspect many more Paleolithic etchings were lost in those decades.

Parts of the cave remain open to the public, but the carved section is closed to protect what's left.

The bigger picture, per Salas-Altès: "Contrary to what was previously thought, northeastern Iberia holds first-rate Paleolithic rock art sites." The discovery, she said, enriches Mediterranean art of western Europe with a graphic tradition distinct from the Franco-Cantabrian one.