BBC: Londoner solves 20,000-year Ice Age drawings mystery. “A London furniture conservator has been credited with a crucial discovery that has helped understand why Ice Age hunter-gatherers drew cave paintings. Ben Bacon analysed 20,000-year-old markings on the drawings, concluding they could refer to a lunar calendar. It led to a specialist team proving early Europeans made notes about the timing of animals’ reproductive cycles.”
Daily Beast: 3D Tech Is Helping Archaeologists Unearth Ancient Indigenous Art. “What is known is that these caves are regarded as sacred places by Native Americans in the American Southeast—considered pathways to the underworld. This is why researchers theorize that the anthropomorphic figures may have been spiritually important. These massive figures are also described in the study as ‘invisible.’ The cave is so cramped, and etchings so faint, that the artwork was overlooked when researchers entered the chamber more than 20 years ago. To solve this, the study team used a technique known as high-resolution 3D photogrammetry to digitally manipulate the chamber space and reveal the artwork.”
Ars Technica: Archaeologists recreated three common kinds of Paleolithic cave lighting. “Lighting sources could indeed hold vital clues to the different ways prehistoric peoples used caves, according to a new paper by a team of Spanish scientists, published in the journal PLOS ONE. They conducted in situ experiments with three different kinds of Paleolithic lighting sources in the hopes of shedding some light (pun intended) on what those various illumination methods might tell us about the emergence of ‘human symbolic and artistic behavior’ in the form of cave art.”
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