New Dating On Chauvet Cave Art

Cave Art in France 10,000 Yrs Older Than Thought

Agence France-Presse | April 13, 2016

Some of the world’s oldest prehistoric artwork, located in the Chauvet-Pont d’Arc cave in southeastern France, is actually 10,000 years older than previously thought, researchers said Tuesday.
The red and black cave drawings contained in the cave are more than 30,000 years old, according to a radiocarbon dating study published this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, a peer-reviewed US journal.
The cave is located in Vallon-Pont d’Arc, Ardeche, and was classified as a United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) World Heritage site in 2014, 20 years after it was first discovered.

Chavet. Source: https://www.pinterest.com/explore/chauvet-910729337595/

"Spray-shaped drawings in an inner gallery of the Chauvet cave may depict a volcanic eruption. Left: general view; right: traced detail, with an overlaid charcoal painting of a giant deer species removed (lower right)." Source: http://www.nature.com/news/cave-of-forgotten-dreams-may-hold-earliest-painting-of-volcanic-eruption-1.19177

<more at http://news.discovery.com/history/cave-artwork-in-france-10000-yrs-older-than-thought-160413.htm; related articles and links: http://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/chauvet-cave-paintings-could-depict-year-old-volcanic-eruption-180957861/?no-ist (Chauvet Cave Paintings Could Depict a 37,000-Year-Old Volcanic Eruption. Mysterious paintings in the “Cave of Forgotten Dreams” led researchers to new evidence of ancient volcanic activity. January 19, 2016) and http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2016/04/06/1523158113 (A high-precision chronological model for the decorated Upper Paleolithic cave of Chauvet-Pont d’Arc, Ardèche, France. Anita Quiles, Hélène Valladas, Hervé Bocherens, Emmanuelle Delqué-Količ, Evelyne Kaltnecker, Johannes van der Plichtf, Jean-Jacques Delannoy, Valérie Feruglio, Carole Fritz, Julien Monney, Michel Philippe, Gilles Tosello, Jean Clottes, and Jean-Michel Geneste. PNAS: Publications of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, Published online before print April 11, 2016, doi: 10.1073/pnas.1523158113. [Abstract: Radiocarbon dates for the ancient drawings in the Chauvet-Pont d’Arc Cave revealed ages much older than expected. These early ages and nature of this Paleolithic art make this United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) site indisputably unique. A large, multidisciplinary dating program has recently mapped the anthropological evolution associated with the cave. More than 350 dates (by 14C, U-Th, TL and 36Cl) were obtained over the last 15 y. They include 259 radiocarbon dates, mainly related to the rock art and human activity in the cave. We present here more than 80 previously unpublished dates. All of the dates were integrated into a high-precision Bayesian model based on archaeological evidence to securely reconstruct the complete history of the Chauvet-Pont d’Arc Cave on an absolute timescale. It shows that there were two distinct periods of human activity in the cave, one from 37 to 33,500 y ago, and the other from 31 to 28,000 y ago. Cave bears also took refuge in the cave until 33,000 y ago.]) >