Hundreds of Ice Age Engravings Found in a Spanish Cave Open to Visitors Since 1957

Archaeologists have recorded 280 engravings on the walls and ceilings of Cova de la Font Major, a cave in Catalonia in northeastern Spain. The carvings were made in the Ice Age, the long cold period that ended roughly 11,700 years ago. ArtNews reports that they include animal pictures and abstract marks.

The animals are the easiest to read. Gizmodo and Yahoo News both report 55 animal figures, including horses and deer. The abstract marks are harder to interpret. One composition contains hundreds of loop-shaped cuts, according to ArtNews.

The cave is not a new discovery in the sense of a place nobody knew. Its entrance was cleared for visitors in 1957, and it became a museum in 1993. The engravings were found in 2019 and described in the journal Antiquity, a peer-reviewed archaeology publication.

Researchers describe the find as one of the largest collections of Ice Age rock art recorded in the Iberian Mediterranean, the Mediterranean coast of the Iberian Peninsula, which covers Spain and Portugal. ArtNews reports that more than half of the Paleolithic rock art recorded in Europe is on that peninsula. Paleolithic is the scientific term for the Old Stone Age, the period when early humans made the first known art.

The Cova de la Font Major engravings are also said to point to a larger population in northeastern Iberia during that period than had been thought. The find is further said to represent a Mediterranean style of image-making with its own identity, according to ArtNews.

The first painted cave accepted as Paleolithic was Altamira, also in Spain, according to the encyclopedia Britannica. Altamira's paintings have drawn visitors for more than a century. Font Major adds a second Spanish site to that story, and its engravings are cut into stone rather than painted.

For visitors, the news is that the walls they may have walked past were covered in art all along. Cut lines that look like scratches to an untrained eye turn out to be deliberate images, some of them tens of thousands of years old. The museum's long history of admitting the public is part of why the find is so striking. Nobody had to go looking for a new cave. They only had to look more closely at one that was already open.