The Oldest Cave Paintings in The Cave of El Castillo

The world’s oldest artwork, believed to be at least 40,800 years old, was discovered in the Cave of El Castillo, literally, “the cave of castles”, near the town of Puente Viesgo, about 30 kilometers south of Santander in the Cantabria region of what is today Spain. The cave and its artwork was discovered more than a century ago but the paintings couldn’t be properly dated using traditional methods such as radiocarbon dating because of the absence of organic pigment. A couple of years ago, a team of archeologists dated the thin layer of calcite formations that developed on top of the art using radioactive decay of uranium and arrived at an astounding figure of 40,800 years, making it the earliest known example of prehistoric art. The caves of El Castillo contain more than 100 different images painted in charcoal and red ochre on the walls and ceilings of multiple chambers. There are pictures and outlines of animals and club-shaped figures but most are simple hand stencils and red disks created by placing hands on the wall surface and blowing paint on top of it. But are those human hands? Archaeologists from England and Spain used the uranium-thorium technique to date 50 paintings and engravings from 11 cave sites in Asturias and Cantabria. They did this by collecting samples of the thin crusts of calcium carbonate that formed atop the images through the same process that forms stalactites and stalagmites. The crusts incorporate small amounts of uranium, which decays into thorium over time. By analyzing the amount of thorium in a sample using a mass spectrometer, the researchers could determine how much time had passed since the crusts formed, thereby providing a minimum age for the images underneath. The paintings, over which the calcite layer formed, has to be obviously older than the first layer, perhaps, by even thousands of years. Modern humans arrived in Europe from Africa some 41,500 years ago.