Unprecedented Ice Age Cave Art Discovered in U.K.

[Dogmudgeon]

I'm still too astounded to make any wise-acre comments on it. So I'll just post the link and a quote.

http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2004/08/0818_040818_ice_age_caveart.html

"Last year we were astounded to have discovered perhaps half a dozen isolated images," said Paul Pettitt, a University of Sheffield archaeologist behind the find. "Now it seems there are more than ten times that number of carvings."

"This find represents the most richly carved ceiling in the whole of cave art … demonstrates that cave art is spread across a much wider geographical area than we originally thought," he said.

Animals depicted on the cave ceiling include bison, wild horses, bears, and ibex—species which went extinct in Britain at the end of the Ice Age 10,000 years ago. Species still found in the U.K. today, such as red deer stags, are also recorded in the rock.

Other themes include "conga lines" of what are believed to represent dancing women and stylized depictions of female genitalia, Pettitt said. Both forms are typical of continental cave art from the same period.

--bkl

[Drifter]

1. Could it be, they just found ...

an old bathroom with the rhymes of the day written on the stall walls.

Here I sit Broken Hearted ...
you get the idea.

Cheers
Drifter

[On the Road]

2. May Be an Important Precursor

Other themes include "conga lines" of what are believed to represent dancing women and stylized depictions of female genitalia, Pettittt said.... The dancing women may have some ancient religious or cosmological significance, Pettitt said. "The art is perhaps recording a spiritual dance at some very important religious event."

Could have been the first British representation of "Christmas in heaven."

[Maple]

3. The thing that astonishes me

about these discoveries, is that the UK is a very small place continuously inhabited for a long time, and yet they are just now coming to light.

I would think there isn't a square inch of the country that hasn't been walked on by human beings, and only now have these paintings been found.

I realize they may be faded, and accept that people wouldn't even consider the possibility they'd exist, but surely someone would have seen something long before this?

Is it because the focus has been on Egypt for so long, that archaologists haven't checked their own back yards?

We seem to be keen on digging up every burial site there ever was in Egypt, but it's only recently that we've discovered entire cities in Peru, westerners buried in China, and now these wonderful paintings in the UK.

Thank you for posting this. It's fascinating.