The Cova de la Font Major in Catalonia has long attracted tourists and scientists. The general consensus was that its walls were too soft for prehistoric artists to sketch their creations. But in 2019, archaeologist Josep Maria Vergès noticed a series of vertical lines that turned out to be part of a large collection of prehistoric art.
Vergès and his colleague Míriam Salas-Altès, both at the Catalan Institute of Human Palaeoecology and Social Evolution, investigated the walls and ceilings. They identified 280 motifs, including 55 animal figures representing horses, deer, or bovids, 40 parallel lines, and other geometric shapes. They reported their findings in Antiquity.
The discovery began while Vergès was overseeing excavations. A researcher told him about tourists in wetsuits who had emerged from an opening leading to a small side cave. Vergès decided to investigate. Inside, he found walls covered with names and dates left by visitors since 1957.
He took off his helmet and shone his headlamp on the graffiti for a closer look. That was when he noticed older lines, then more. The small cave was an entire gallery of Paleolithic art.
The team described a mixture of excitement and disbelief in a joint comment to Gizmodo. It seemed extraordinary that so many visitors had passed through without noticing the engravings.
The researchers were confident that the style was prehistoric, but they also analyzed the engravings' physical traits and compared their chemical composition to check that they were not modern forgeries. To estimate their age, they compared technical, stylistic, and thematic features with other well-dated collections of rock art. Radiocarbon dating provided information about when humans occupied the site; it did not directly date the engravings.
The team places the art in the Upper Paleolithic, during the last glacial period, with an estimated age of at least 19,000 years. Refining that estimate remains a goal.
The size of the collection makes it unusual. According to the researchers, fewer than 10 percent of rock art sites in the region contain more than 20 animal drawings, while 75 percent have no more than five. The figures also include an unusual subject for Paleolithic art: a bear, drawn with its ears facing forward and its mouth slightly open.
Why did the engravings go unnoticed? The team suspects that lighting and perception both played a part. Frontal lighting from headlamps makes the old drawings less visible, while modern graffiti stands out more readily. Visitors may have seen obvious markings without recognizing their significance.
One experienced guide reportedly told the researchers that she had visited the gallery hundreds of times without noticing the horse. Once someone pointed it out, however, it became the first thing she noticed whenever she entered.
The gallery is now closed to the public because its walls are too fragile. But further discoveries may await elsewhere in the cave. Some entrances remain blocked by sediment, potentially concealing other galleries. The newly discovered gallery itself had been sealed by sediment until 1853.