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ARCHAEOLOGY

Shoe that lay in prof’s office is nearly 6,000 years old

A snowshoe discovered over a decade ago in Italy’s Dolomite mountains and previously thought to belong to a nineteenth century cattle farmer is actually nearly six thousand years old, it has been revealed.

Published: 13 September 2016 17:45 CEST
Shoe that lay in prof's office is nearly 6,000 years old
The snowshoe was just a few thousand years older than thought. Photo: Roman Clara/Bolzano regional government
The shoe was found in 2003 in the melting snow of Gurgler Eisjoch glacier by Simone Bartolini, a cartographer for the Military Geographic Institute in Florence. Bartolini was mapping the Austrian-Italian border in South Tyrol, a German-speaking area of northern Italy. 
 
Assuming the shoe to be about a hundred years old, Bartolini displayed the shoe in his office as a memento. He only realised that it was much older than previously thought after discussing it with an archaeologist colleague. 
 
Radiocarbon dating by two separate labs now shows the shoe dates from 3800-3700 BC. This makes it up to 600 years older than the famous ice man Ötzi, who was found in 1991 just seven kilometres from the site of the latest discovery.
 
The shoe was presented at a press conference in South Tyrol on Monday. It is made from a 1.5 metre piece of birch wood bent into an oval. 
 
“It is the oldest snowshoe in the world,” the scientists said in a statement.
 
Catrin Marzoli, director of the South Tyrol office of archaeological monuments, told a press conference in Bolzano on Monday that the snow shoes were almost identical to those worn in the area until just a few decades ago.
 
“The glacier has given us an exceptional testimony”.
 
“It indicates that as early as the late Neolithic period people with proper equipment were present on the alpine watershed at an altitude of over three thousand meters,” she said, according to Südtirol News
 
Archaeologists believe that ancient glaciers melted by global warming could turn up a large number of prehistoric finds in the future.

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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