By Jennifer Ouellette
For over a decade, Maria Medina, an archaeologist affiliated with Argentina’s University of Cordoba, has been conducting research on what she terms “smoke archaeology”: trying to reconstruct Europe’s prehistoric past by analyzing the remnants of torches, fire, and smoke in French and Spanish caves. Her latest discovery is that humans regularly visited the Caves of Nerja as far back as 41,000 years ago, a good 10,000 years earlier than previously believed, according to a recent paper published in the journal Scientific Reports (https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-023-32544-1).
Archaeological excavations of the Nerja Caves over the decades have unearthed skeletal human remains dating back to around 25,000 BCE on, as well as animal bones, shells, fish bones, and stone and bone tools. Small groups of humans used the caves seasonally until 21,000 BCE, when they became a permanent residence. By 4500 BCE, it seems the caves were being used for farming and making pottery. Textiles were being made by 3800 BCE, with some parts of the cave being used for burial.
In 2012, Spanish archaeologists announced the discovery of two cave paintings of what appear to be seals, believed to be the oldest cave paintings yet found based on radiocarbon dating of charcoal remains found nearby. They are believed to be 42,300 to 43,500 years old. That’s significantly older than the 30,000-year-old Chauvet cave paintings in southeast France. It’s even possible that the seal paintings were created by Neanderthals since some scholars think they were still living in the south and west of the Iberian peninsula until some 37,000 years ago. However, Homo sapiens might also have been in the region around that time.
Studying these caves using fire and smoke can tell researchers more about the customs and rituals of these prehistoric humans. For instance, in 2021, Medina and several colleagues conducted in situ experiments with three different kinds of Paleolithic lighting sources in the hopes of shedding some light (pun intended) on what those various illumination methods might tell us about the emergence of “human symbolic and artistic behavior” in the form of cave art. The Spanish team conducted their experiments at the Isuntza 1 Cave in Spain’s Basque country. They chose lighting types based on known archaeological data: five torches, two stone lamps with animal fat, and a small fireplace.
Their measurements showed that the various lighting sources had very different characteristics and were thus probably used in different contexts. The wooden torches, for instance, emitted light in all directions, up to nearly six meters (19.6 feet), and lasted an average of 41 minutes. The torches exhibited uneven light intensity and often needed to be relit by waving them from side to side, and they produced a lot of smoke, so they worked best for exploring caves or crossing wide spaces.
By contrast, the grease lamps emitted weaker light akin to the intensity of a candle over a span of three meters (9.8 feet) or so. They burned consistently and didn’t smoke for over an hour, but they had a dazzling effect if the person was moving and didn’t illuminate the floor very well. This makes the lamps better suited for lighting small cave spaces over a longer period, complementing the advantages of the torches. As for the fireplace—the only truly static system—its illumination covered a range of 6.6 meters (21.6 feet). However, it burned for just 30 minutes and gave off a lot of white smoke, making it unsuitable for use unless there were strong enough air currents to disperse that smoke.
Furthermore, in 2022, English archaeologists analyzed limestone plaquettes excavated from a railway site in southern France in 1866. They concluded that the stones may have been deliberately placed around fire hearths. The team’s digital reconstructions showed that the engraved images would appear to move and flicker in the firelight, amounting to a kind of animated fireside art. The same might be true of the Nerja Caves. “The prehistoric paintings were viewed in the flickering light of the flames, which could give the figures a certain sense of movement and warmth,” said Medina. “There is still much it can reveal about what we were like.”
For this latest research, Medina et al. collected samples of soot (black marks), samples from a stalagmite with soot microlayers in the Cataclysm Room, residues from the interiors of fixed lamps, and charcoal remnants on the ground. The various collected samples were then subjected to radiocarbon dating, Raman spectroscopy, and transmission electron microscopy, among other techniques, for analysis. The objective: to determine if these remains were left by single visits or recurrent ones.
With this interdisciplinary approach, Medina and her colleagues were able to document 73 distinct phases of visits over 35,000 years, by far the largest known number of visits for a European prehistoric cave. That means that humans visited the caves about every 35 years on average. The analysis also revealed a strong preference for a particular type of pine for building fires. “There is a repeated and almost exclusive use of this type of wood for cave raids and for lighting,” the authors wrote. It’s not clear why this wood was preferred over other species common to the region, but their resinous nature might have made them ideal for lighting purposes.
The oldest residues date back 41,000 years to the Upper Paleolithic period and were collected from two different points in the Upper Gallery, in areas more than 1 kilometer (a little over half a mile) from the entrance and quite difficult to access. To support this conclusion, Medina et al. cited a 2016 study finding evidence (in the form of lighting systems) of Neanderthal occupation deep in the Bruniquel Cave in southwestern France. “The evidence from Nerja would be a significant novelty, as it would certify the ability of another ancient human species (Homo neanderthalis) not only to frequent areas in total darkness and far from the entrance (as in the case of the Bruniquel Cave), but also to overcome extremely difficult speleological obstacles inside caves,” (https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-023-32544-1)
AR #101
Neanderthal & Civilization
by Martin Ruggles
