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ARCHAEOLOGY

Spain sends stolen booty back to Colombia

Spain is to return almost 700 archaeological artefacts, worth a total of €5.15 million ($7 million), to Colombia after seizing them eleven years ago during a drug-trafficking investigation then storing them in a museum.

Spain sends stolen booty back to Colombia
The legal battle over the collection took so long that the criminals arrested for their theft have already served out their sentences and been released. Photo: GERARD JULIEN / AFP

The 691 pieces were smuggled into Spain in 2003 by a man under investigation for suspected connections to Colombian drug cartels.

Police seized the 3,000-year-old busts, statues and stone jewellery in a raid as part of ‘Operation Florencia’ which looked into money-laundering by the drug gangs.

29 people were arrested, convicted, sent to prison and subsequently released after serving their sentences.

Throughout this time, the valuable haul was then stashed in Madrid's Museum of America while a complex legal battle was fought to determine its rightful owner.

A court finally decided on June 10th that the pieces should be handed over to Colombian authorities.

The collection is said to be of huge cultural and architectural value, according to local daily Madridiario.

The Colombian ambassador to Madrid, Fernando Carrillo Perez, said at a handing-over ceremony on Tuesday that the collection was the equivalent of “a museum coming to Colombia.”

Police General Director Ignacio Cosido said: “More than 95 per cent of the items are genuine.”

He added: “As well as their economic value, the pieces' greatest value comes from their roots, which is an expression of history itself, of culture and of every nation's soul.”

The rightful owners of 300 other seized pieces have not yet been identified.

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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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