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CAVE

Tourists trapped overnight in 100-metre deep French cave

Three tourists had to spend Sunday night underground in a cave in southwestern France after site personnel shut off the exit at closing time.

Tourists trapped overnight in 100-metre deep French cave
Photo: AFP

Three Spanish tourists were left trapped underground in France’s Padirac Cave on Sunday after failing to hear staff announcing that visiting hours were over. 

It is believed that the visitors at the famous cave in the Occitan department of Lot were using a new audio guide system with headphones that prevented them from hearing the closure calls.

Once they realised access to the staircase and lift that take visitors back to the top had been closed, they called out for help but all staff at Padirac Cave had left by then, French daily 20 Minutes reported.

 

#padirac #france

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It remains unclear whether the trapped tourists had mobile phones with them or if they were unable to get network signal underground.

In the end it was a case of “mañana, mañana” for the Iberian trio, left with no other choice but to spend a surreal night underground.

On Monday morning, staff were shocked to find the disgruntled tourists at the site.

They have since decided to press charges.

The experience could have been even more unpleasant for them had they been caught underground during the violent thunderstorms forecast for much of metropolitan France on Tuesday.

Padirac is a chasm – a deep fissure in the earth's surface or vertical cave of sorts- meaning the locked up tourists might have had to cope with heavy rainfall falling on them as well.

Padirac, France’s most popular underground site, receives 470,000 visitors a year.

This is the first time in the thirty years since it opened to the public that there has been an incident.

Visitors at Padirac descend 75 metres via a lift or a staircase before entering into the cave system, which is 103 metres deep and 19 kilometres long.  

The cave, contains a subterranean river system that is partly navigable by boat, and is regarded as one of the most extraordinary natural phenomena of France’s Massif Central.
 

 

#gouffre #padirac #francia #france

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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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