Engraving of a horse on the cave wall in Cova de la Font Major.

Inscriptions at the Cova de la Font Major cave system in Catalonia in northeastern Spain prompts rethink of prehistoric population and cultural trends. Credit: Vergès Bosch, J. M., Salas-Altès, M./Antiquity

Archaeologists have described hundreds of rock-art engravings dating back around 26,000 years in a cave frequently visited by tourists in Catalonia — a region of northeastern Spain that was thought to be almost devoid of palaeolithic art1. The findings were published in the journal Antiquity on 5 November.

Josep Maria Vergès Bosch, an archaeologist at the Catalan Institute of Human Paleoecology and Social Evolution (IPHES-CERCA) in Tarragona, Spain, spotted some prehistoric engravings among more-modern graffiti in the Cova de la Font Major during a planned excavation in 2019.

Vergès and archaeologist Míriam Salas-Altès at IPHES-CERCA studied 280 Palaeolithic art motifs, including 55 animal depictions, from the cave. “The sheer quantity of art discovered at the Cova de la Font Major is exceptional,” says Salas-Altès.

Early animation

The cave system — made up of more than 3.5 kilometres of underground passageways that have been occupied numerous times during human history — has been open to the public for some seven decades and became a museum in the 1990s.

The drawings were easy to miss. “When you shine a light straight on the engravings, they are really difficult to see, you have to play with light from different directions to see the depressions,” says Salas-Altès.

A researcher in the cave taking notes and using a torch as illumination.

Researcher Míriam Salas-Altès documents engravings in a tunnel of the cave system. Credit: Josep Maria Vergès/IPHES-CERCA

The etchings include images of animals such as a horse, a bear and an aurochs (the ancestor of domestic cattle), as well as myriad swirling lines. A handful of the engravings reveal how the artists used “natural lines or fissures in the walls”, says Salas-Altès. For example, “one is used to represent the ground under a horse”.

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