Saturday, May 14, 2016

'Stone Age Art' in Bavarian cave not carved by humans after all


The Mäanderhöhle cave near Bamberg was previously regarded as an archaeological sensation. It was thought to contain some of the oldest cave art in Germany. However, Julia Blumenröther, a former student at Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg, has demonstrated in her Master's thesis that the markings discovered inside the cave in 2005 are not fertility symbols carved by humans as previously thought. In fact, these lines occurred as a result of natural processes, the archaeologist says.
One of the caverns in the 75-metre long cave is full of spherical deposits of minerals known as cave clouds that form on rocks in a similar way to stalactites and stalagmites. In 2005, cave researchers discovered a large number of lines that looked like they could have been made by humans on the rock-hard surface of these cave clouds. An archaeologist studied these lines several years later and published his interpretation of them in a preliminary report, in which he said that the between 14,000 and 16,000 year-old lines were made by humans and probably depicted a phallus and abstract female figures.
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