The pictures show animals including a buffalo, a horse and even a rhinoceros. “It is for the first time in Central Europe that… art this old has been found and confirmed”, said a joint statement from the Romanian Federation of Speleology — the scientific study of caves — and Jean Clottes, an expert working with UNESCO.

It is a “major discovery” and “its authenticity is certain”, Clottes, a specialist in prehistoric art, told AFP. He was called on by Romanian specialists to certify the discovery. His team included cavers, a paleontologist, an archaeologist and two cave art specialists and estimated the drawings were “attributable to a period of ancient rock art, the Gravettian or the Aurignacian (between 23,000 and 35,000 years ago).”

Carbon tests must confirm these estimates, they said.

The black-paint drawings, discovered three or four months ago in the Coliboaia cave in northwestern Romania, depict animals, including a buffalo, a horse, bear heads and rhinoceros, federation chief Viorel Traian Lascu said.

original here

A 5,500-year-old leather shoe has been found in a cave in Armenia. The shoe – 1,000 years older than Giza’s Great Pyramid and 400 years older than Stonehenge – is perfectly preserved and was found complete with shoelaces. It is believed to be the oldest example of enclosed leather footwear, out-dating the shoes worn by Otzi the Iceman by a few hundred years.

The shoe is sole-less, made out of a single piece of cow hide and was shaped to the wearer’s right foot. It contained grass, which might have served to either keep the foot warm or to maintain the shape of the shoe. It is not known whether the shoe – 24.5cm long and a European size 37 – belonged to a man or a woman, though it would have been ideal for a male of that era.

The shoe is similar to the ‘pampootsies’ worn until the 1950s on Ireland’s Aran Islands. “In fact, enormous similarities exist between manufacturing technique and style of this shoe and those found across Europe at later periods, suggesting that this type of shoe was worn for thousands of years across a large and environmentally diverse geographic region,” said Dr Ron Pinhasi of Cork University.

original here with more info

During the extensive period of time recorded in the Nerja Cave between 30000 and 3000 years before present, which corresponds to the Late Pleistocene and Holocene lower end and half the rooms on the entrance to the Cave of Nerja were occupied by populations modern humans (Homo sapiens) during the stages of prehistory known as the Gravettian, Solutrean, Magdalenian, Epipaleolithic, Neolithic and Chalcolithic. Throughout this broad chronological period in which the cave was inhabited, the different populations that occurred at the time they left on the floor of the rooms occupied by the remains of their daily activities (making stone tools and bone development of ornaments, ceramic vessels carrying, handling, processing and consumption of food, etc). The study of these remains using modern research techniques in prehistoric archeology has allowed us to know how these people lived in environments that move, that animals used for food and their clothing, as they related to the sea, and other many aspects of their activities and characteristics of the coast of Malaga, within this broad span of time. As singular facts, we can point to the jurisdiction of the first group of people who lived in the cave with the hyenas from the use of the same, consumption of fish, birds and mammals typical of more northern latitudes in the colder times recorded in the sequence of the cave or the extraordinary consumption of mussels and other marine molluscs at the end of the Upper Pleistocene.

original here

Cueva de Nerja

http://www.napoliunderground.org/it/nug-channel.html

The congress program:

http://www.napoliunderground.org/it/forum.html?func=view&catid=8&id=11

Best regards Fulvio NapoliUnderground

This is the third time, that Commissione Cavita’ Artificiali SSI, the comission for artifical caves in Italy, visits Jordan for exploration purposes. They give support to the University of Florence. Recently they discovered a cave church with five graves in the wall, probably of Byzantine period, with remains of frescoes and a cross painted.

more here and here.