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ARCHAEOLOGY

Italy reclaims looted treasures from Swiss

Switzerland has finalized a 13-year process of returning more than 4,500 ancient artifacts to Italy that were stolen by a criminal gang, the Swiss justice ministry said on Thursday.

Italy reclaims looted treasures from Swiss
A display at Rome's Quirinale museum - the works shown are not those recovered by Swiss authorities. Photo: Tiziana Fabi/AFP

The Alpine country this week repatriated the final 68 looted artifacts to its southern neighbour, ending a restitution process that began in 2001, the  ministry said in a statement.

"This restitution marks the end of a procedure of judicial mutual assistance that has lasted for years and has allowed for the return of a total of 4,536 objects," it said.

Switzerland still has several hundred objects seized from art dealers in its possession, Basel public prosecutor spokesman Peter Gill told AFP.

"We are still trying to determine their origin," he said, adding that they did not come from Italy.

Italian authorities requested Switzerland's help with the case in 2001 after uncovering a criminal gang – including an antiques dealer, businessmen, a banker and others – that had been smuggling artifacts out of the country.

Swiss prosecutors have since seized some 5,800 objects, most of which came from illegal digs in Italy, including around 100 archaeological treasures from the Etruscan and Roman periods.

Five icons were also found to have been stolen in Greece and returned to Greek authorities.

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ARCHAEOLOGY

Study confirms ancient cave art in southern Spain was created by Neanderthals

Neanderthals, long perceived to have been unsophisticated and brutish, really did paint stalagmites in a Spanish cave more than 60,000 years ago, according to a study published on Monday.

Study confirms ancient cave art in southern Spain was created by Neanderthals
Photo: Joao Zilhao/ICREA/AFP

The issue had roiled the paleoarchaeology community ever since the publication of a 2018 paper attributing red ocher pigment found on the stalagmitic dome of Cueva de Ardales (Malaga province) to our extinct “cousin” species.

The dating suggested the art was at least 64,800 years old, made at a time when modern humans did not inhabit the continent.

But the finding was contentious, and “a scientific article said that perhaps these pigments were a natural thing,” a result of iron oxide flow, Francesco d’Errico, co-author of a new paper in the journal PNAS told AFP.

A new analysis revealed the composition and placement of the pigments were not consistent with natural processes — instead, the pigments were applied through splattering and blowing.

(Photo by JORGE GUERRERO / AFP)

What’s more, their texture did not match natural samples taken from the caves, suggesting the pigments came from an external source.

More detailed dating showed that the pigments were applied at different points in time, separated by more than ten thousand years.This “supports the hypothesis that the Neanderthals came on several occasions, over several thousand years, to mark the cave with pigments,” said d’Errico, of the University of Bordeaux.

It is difficult to compare the Neanderthal “art” to wall paintings made by prehistoric modern humans, such as those found in the Chauvet-Pont d’Arc cave of France, more 30,000 years old.

But the new finding adds to increasing evidence that Neanderthals, whose lineage went extinct around 40,000 years ago, were not the boorish relatives of Homo sapiens they were long portrayed to be.

The cave-paintings found in three caves in Spain, one of them in Ardales, are throught to have been created between 43,000 and 65,000 years ago, 20,000 years before modern humans arrived in Europe. (Photo by JORGE GUERRERO / AFP)

The team wrote that the pigments are not “art” in the narrow sense of the word “but rather the result of graphic behaviors intent on perpetuating the symbolic significance of a space.”

The cave formations “played a fundamental role in the symbolic systems of some Neanderthal communities,” though what those symbols meant remains a mystery for now.

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