27,000 years later, art found in cave
Published 9:00 pm Friday, June 2, 2006
VILHONNEUR, France – A 27,000-year-old human skeleton laid out in a room decorated with ancient art and a crude representation of a face are among the rare finds in a cave in western France, officials said Friday.
It was only the second time that a human body is known to have been placed in a decorated cave from the Upper Paleolithic Period, the French Culture Ministry said.
A single face drawn in the cave could be among the world’s oldest known graphic representations of a human face, said Jean-Yves Baratin, archaeology curator for the Poitou-Charentes region.
He said two pieces of calcite that split were used to form the hair with two black horizontal strokes depicting the eyes. A vertical stroke formed the nose and another horizontal stroke the mouth.
Cavers exploring part of a grotto once used to dispose of animal carcasses discovered the cave in December. The find was announced in February but it was not until Friday that information about what it contained was disclosed.
