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TOURISTS

Tourists find skeleton of Roman child inside cave

Excursionists hiking up a mountain in the Lazio region were stunned last week after they came across the suspected skeleton of an ancient Roman child while exploring a cave.

Published: 8 June 2016 12:32 CEST
Tourists find skeleton of Roman child inside cave
The cave where the bones were found. Photo: Egnoka/Wikimedia

The bones were found inside a shattered Roman clay jar, or anfora, which the hikers noticed sticking out of the ground inside the 35 metre-wide Grotta delle Capre, which translates as 'Cave of Goats.'

The cave is located on the rocky promontory of Monte Circeo – which rises 541 metres above the Mediterranean coast.


Not a bad spot for a hike: Monte Circeo, which lies alongside. Photo: Alessandra Kocman/Flickr

Once the tourists entered the grotto, they found the remains almost fully exposed as part of the cave floor had recently given way.  

Police suspect the floor's collapse may have been brought on by a clandestine dig and have since blocked access to the site.

“It's an extraordinary and unexpected find”, a spokesperson for the San Felice Circeo council told The Local.

“The cave is renowned among academics thanks to what it has revealed about the landscape of Italy during the last glacial period, but its more recent human history is still largely a mystery.”

The Grotta delle Capre has been used by local people since ancient times often serving, as its name suggests, as a place for herders to shelter their goats.

Local legends claim the cave was once home to a powerful sorceress: a story archaeologists now think might have its roots in reality.

Romans usually cremated their deceased, or buried them in mausoleums. Given the nature of the find, archaeologists suspect the cave may once have been a place Romans used to carry out  non-standard, cultish burial rituals.

“Paleontologists working at the site decades ago, actually unearthed two similar clay-jar burials and the remains of a hippopotamus during partial excavations,” the spokesperson added.

Archaeologists from Italy's Culture Ministry are now considering whether to excavate the entire cave in the hope it can shed new light on ancient Roman burial rites.

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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.

Published: 3 August 2021 09:13 CEST
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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