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ARCHAEOLOGY

Spanish 18th century ship found off Argentina

A team of archaeologists in Argentina has pinpointed the location of the 1765 shipwreck of a Spanish merchant ship off the southern coast, officials said Saturday.

Published: 9 March 2014 11:10 CET

Spanish 18th century ship found off Argentina

The town of Ushuaia in southern Argentina. Photo: Wikimedia

It is the oldest wrecked ship of twelve that were identified along 200 kilometres off the windswept Tierra del Fuego coast.

The ship, "La Purisima Concepcion," went down January 10th 1765 off the Mitre peninsula — about 3,500 kilometres south of Buenos Aires — as it headed for the turbulent Cape Horn after sailing from Cadiz and stopping in Montevideo.

"It is not a galleon loaded with gold and pearls like in the movies; it's just a supply ship. But we have chosen not to disclose the exact location so as not to encourage anyone to go souvenir hunting," said Martin Vazquez, the lead archaeologist on the team that found the ship.

He previously led Ushuaia's End of the World Museum. It sponsored several expeditions since 2009 searching for these lost vessels, an an area where extreme winds and snow are the order of the day most of the year.

Many of the 193 people on board the ship that wrecked survived and were able to build small boats with which they ultimately headed to Buenos Aires.

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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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