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.

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”.